“I—” She hadn’t done it on purpose. Vera looked out across the hall, finding far too many pairs of eyes staring back at her. She swallowed and told him about how it had been before, how no one could remember her. “I’m not used to being known or even noticed by anyone. And who even are all these people?”
Lancelot let out a long exhale. “Overwhelming is an understatement,” he said gravely before he turned to the room, and his severity dropped away. “And these are all the noble folk in town. Most helped to fund our war efforts, some are successful merchants. And that man who just sat down over there …” He inclined his head toward the recently occupied seats on the other side of Arthur’s empty chair. “Don’t look,” he added a half second after Vera had turned.
“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.
