Yes. It was selfish, maybe even foolish. But she chose Gawain.
She took the potion and felt all her senses awaken as she sat in the chair. He stood behind her as Merlin had, his hands in the same position over her ears, fingers on her temples. Vera’s heart raced, pounding at her chest as if it wanted to escape her body.
Yet as soon as he breached the space where her mind began, it was different. He moved gently. As he roamed through the corridors of Vera’s mind, she could sense his care in avoiding things that weren’t pertinent. He inspected her memories from a safe distance like a child with his hands in his pocket at a museum, scrolling quickly past her moments alone with Arthur. Paying no heed to Lancelot at all. He didn’t tug anything to the forefront, though he lingered near the spots where Merlin had interfered before.
Those sections felt like … like torn paper. A page ripped from where it belonged.
She knew—she didn’t know how, she just knew—that if he’d gone any closer to those jagged places, it would have hurt. But he didn’t. Vera began to relax.
Then, Gawain reached a spot where he outright stopped.
“Oh,” he said, stunned, and it echoed through the cavern of her mind. “Can you feel this?”
She shook her head beneath his fingers. There wasn’t anything where he stopped. It was … blank.
Wait.
It was blank. No other part of her mind had been empty.
“I think if I …” His presence moved closer to the dark void, drawing a perimeter around it, bringing it into focus for Vera. It had a feeling to it, too. A dull throb that was quite at home in her, like a toothache she’d had for so long that she’d forgotten about it.
It was a barrier.
“Holy shit,” Vera said. It was expansive and—this was it. She was entirely certain. This was everything she couldn’t access. It was in there. Gawain traced along it, back, back, back into the recesses of her memory.
“I would guess that the front, where I started, are your most recent memories. It’s ironclad. I believe this part,” he said of the space farthest into her mind, “is early in your life as Guinevere. It feels more porous. We could probably find some openings there, though it will hurt if I apply pressure.”
They were close, though. Now, having sensed it and knowing that it truly was there, Vera couldn’t stand the thought of walking away. “Can you try?”
Gawain’s presence went still. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
She braced herself for it to begin. When he started to apply pressure, the pain came with it. She gasped, and he hesitated, but she’d felt it. The barrier had given a tiny shiver.
“Keep going,” she said. But he didn’t move. She’d lose her nerve if he didn’t go now. “Do it!”
He did, with renewed vigor. The agony swelled like her head was being slowly crushed. Vera had a death grip on the arms of the chair, her teeth grinding together with such force they might crack. It hurt so badly that she couldn’t breathe. That explosions of light appeared on the backs of her eyelids. That awareness and reason drifted far from her grasp.
Then it all stopped.
Gawain’s careful presence was gone inside and out, his fingers having released her. Vera was left gasping as the pressure abated into sweet, blissful relief.
“I was fine,” she barely managed to mumble as her chin lolled onto her chest, which only served to emphasize that, indeed, she wasn’t.
She rubbed at her temples—they were shockingly hot to her own touch. Vera opened her eyes and blinked. She couldn’t see straight. She heard a loud scraping that didn’t make sense before something cool and solid was pressed into her hand.
“Drink,” Gawain said. It was a cup filled with water.
She drained it all before her vision swam into focus. Gawain had dragged his chair over and was sitting in front of her. A blessedly cool blast of air blew over her skin. He’d opened the door and extinguished the fire, too.
Vera willed herself to speak and found she couldn’t.
“I could have broken that barrier,” Gawain said quietly, his low volume a gift to her throbbing skull. “It’s the same way Merlin would do it.” He swallowed and shook his head. “You would not be all right. It would sever many of the connections in your brain, leaving you permanently changed.”
It sounded like a lobotomy. Well … plenty of people had gotten those. It wasn’t ideal, but some had good lives after, didn’t they? Different, but … maybe good.
Gawain made sure she was looking at him before he continued. “But that is the best outcome you could hope for, and it’s highly likely there would be far worse impacts. My best guess is that you would succumb to the trauma of your injuries before you could share those memories. The sort of magic that would be required to save you only exists in myth. Merlin should know that.” He stared at the smoldering embers in the hearth. “You would be dead, and all that you contained gone with you.”
It was a strange notion to consider her life like a question in an ethics class: should you take the chance of finding the key to fixing a whole world at the expense of one life?
It would have been an easy choice to make—if it had a decent shot of working. “Shit,” Vera said.
Gawain hummed a rueful chuckle. “Indeed.”
“And you’re beginning to agree with Merlin … You think my memories are needed, don’t you?” she asked.
“There’s something important within you,” he said carefully, just as he’d told her before. “But the king is right: this is not an option.”
“What am I going to do?” Vera dropped her head into her hands. “I have to fix this, Gawain.”
“If I break the barrier by force, that’s what would cause the damage. But did you feel the way it moved a bit under pressure?”
“Yes,” she said.
“With healing intervention, we could keep doing this. I push enough to chip away at the barrier but give you potion and time to heal in between sessions, and then we try again. It won’t be as fast as Merlin hopes, and it’s certainly not ideal for your well-being, but after some time, I believe it may work to dismantle the barrier. It’s likely our best option.”
He fished out a healing potion for her, but other than running hot, she already felt fine by the time she drank it.
“You’re busy. I don’t want to take any more of your time,” Vera said, thinking of whoever he’d thought he was scolding when she came in. Whether she acknowledged it or not, she was the queen, and Gawain had been beholden to drop what he was doing for her.
She was halfway to the door when he said, “Guinna?”
She turned as he carefully tucked his glass-bulbed instrument into a box beneath his desk.
“Would you like to walk with me to the festival grounds?” he asked.
She smiled as she nodded, and they left the tower in silence. Vera never felt a need to fill the quiet with Gawain.
Tables and chairs were already set for the welcome feast in the open space behind the training field. Workers rushed to and fro, stacking a buffet table with trays and plates. Five men were positioning a massive and ornate marble sculpture in the middle of it. The impressive piece had to be at least as tall as Vera, depicting a soldier with his sword raised. It was unwieldy to manage, taking all the men’s strength to keep it steady.
Gawain set to work right away, and Vera scanned the field until her eyes landed on Arthur. He stood next to Percival and Lancelot, who were seated at a table on the outskirts.
Arthur’s gaze was pulled up to her as if compelled by an unseeable force, and his face brightened, lips lifting at the corners. Butterflies exploded in her stomach. How had she ever been unsure if he was handsome?