“He already has.” She relished the way the revelation made Merlin gasp and stumble a step backward. “Gawain has been in my mind. He knows all about me.”
Fear flashed across his face. “That wasn’t yours to tell,” he said.
“Right. Because it’s only my choice when it benefits you?” She knew he wouldn’t answer, but she let the silence hang between them before she continued. “Go out and get the rest of our party. We’ll leave for the Magesary as soon as they’re back. You can tell Arthur what happened here, or you can wait and let me. I’ll leave that up to you.”
Merlin looked at her like she was mad. “I’m not leaving you here—”
“I am your queen,” Vera said, “and I command you to go.”
Merlin took a long, rattling inhale. He touched his fingers to his forehead, his eyes wrought with disbelief. “You will doom us all.”
He left without so much as a glance back.
Vera watched the closed door for a long moment before she looked at Lancelot. “Have I made a terrible mistake?”
“No,” he said adamantly. He swept her tightly to his chest and held her, kissing the top of her head. “I’m so proud of you.” She felt his body trembling.
Vera pulled back, really seeing him, taking in the depth of his panic, and hearing Merlin’s words echo in her mind. I was not responsible the last time he found his wife dead. At that moment, she understood, and her heart ached. “When Merlin brought Guinevere back, and she went mad, you were the one who killed her, weren’t you?”
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply before he quietly said, “Yes. A version of you died at my hands. I won’t let you die again.”
She took his hand and kissed his knuckles. “We’re all going to die someday.”
Lancelot opened his eyes and fixed her with a stern look. “You are not allowed to die.”
Vera laughed, and he smiled, too. “I promise not to die if you promise not to,” she said.
“Deal. No dying allowed.”
The rest of the travel party wouldn’t be gone much longer, but Vera buzzed with adrenaline. She felt … different. There was dread about her decision’s gravity, but there was elation, too.
“Do we have time to run?” she asked as she paced the room.
Lancelot had been nearly as eager for it as her, though he insisted that Vera wear her armor and sword. “We should have been doing this more. It’s good training.”
Vera groaned. She’d only run with her armor and the sword Randall made her once before. It was cumbersome how the sword, strapped to her back, clanged about and threatened to trip her every step when she didn’t actively think about its presence.
“All the more reason to do it now and get used to it,” Lancelot said. “Sort of the whole point of training, Guinna.”
She argued for no helmets or leg guards, just a chainmail shirt over her running clothes with her sword and shield strapped on her back. Lancelot, presumably softened from his close brush with losing her, rolled his eyes and relented.
Vera took the back stairs down past the kitchen, where she nearly ran head-on into a tank of a man hefting giant sacks of grain from the back of a cart into the inn’s kitchen.
“Morning!” she squeaked as she darted past him. His eyes landed on her, and they didn’t leave. She thought he might have recognized her, but then his expression went vacant and unreadable. It unnerved Vera, but she quickly forgot about it when she rounded the corner and found Lancelot waiting for her in his chainmail shirt with his much heavier sword strapped in a sheath on his back.
Lancelot reached into his pocket and pulled out what, at first glance, she thought was a rodent. She jumped back from the fuzzy grey ball dancing in his palm. But it wasn’t fur. Vera stepped closer. The baseball-sized lump was made of swirling grey smoke that whirled contentedly in his hand. It had no face nor any kind of features, yet somehow, it felt happy.
“I wanted you to know about this in case I bump my head on a branch and get knocked out or otherwise incapacitated. It’s another Gawain invention,” he said, his mouth lifting in a crooked smile. “He has one, and I have one. If shit goes sideways for them, his will come flying and find us—and then it can lead us back to his location. Likewise, if one of us gives this a good chuck, it’ll find Gawain.”
Vera poked the wisp and had the distinct sense that it giggled, though she heard no sound. “How is it … cute?”
Lancelot laughed. “I don’t know. Gawain is the most extraordinary weirdo,” he said fondly.
It only took ten minutes of running for days of mounting stress to feel lighter. Vera and Lancelot slid back into their usual banter. She teased him about how many times he’d told her to “shut up” earlier before they moved on to gossiping about whether Randall and Matilda had taken up together.
It was never to be more than a few miles out into the woods next to town before they turned around. They’d looped around a tree to head back and had run past a burly man with an axe just off the lane. After a few minutes, Lancelot went quiet. He only responded to Vera with one or two-word responses. Then his smile dropped, and his features went taut.
Vera’s skin prickled as she said, “What’s going—”
