“You are here?” she said with immense effort, surprised by the rasp of her own voice. “How?” Vera swallowed and cleared her throat, which she noticed was sore.
“I—felt like I should be,” he said. His eyes searched her. She didn’t understand why he looked so frightened.
But the other man did, too. Her friend. It was silly, really. Vera couldn’t summon his name. She knew it … of course she knew it. “It was different the second time,” he said. Lancelot. That was his name. “You screamed for half an hour straight.”
Then she noticed Merlin, next to Arthur, nearer her head. A sheen of sweat coated his brow as one pearl broke free and tumbled down his face. She’d not yet seen the mage sweat.
“What happened?” Merlin asked. “Do you remember what was so awful?”
Vera wiped water from her face with her free hand. She did not let go of Arthur. “I—” She meant to tell them about the field and how it wouldn’t stop, but it took so much effort to form words. Too much.
“I felt stuck” was all she could manage.
“You were stuck,” Lancelot said, his eyes uncharacteristically wild and wide, shirt splotched with patches of wet. “We both started trying to pull you out—maybe ten minutes in. Positively shook you, to be honest. Merlin sort of zapped you with magic. You kept screaming. Nothing worked until …” He looked at Arthur.
“His Majesty showed up after we’d tried everything and tried it a second time,” Merlin said. “When he took your hand, you stopped screaming, but you didn’t come out as you should have.” His weary face bore a glint of hope. “Did you remember anything?”
The fog of being in two minds at once was lifting, and for that, Vera’s answer came quickly and assuredly. “Yes. I remembered.”
Dried and dressed, she sat by Merlin’s desk with the three men. Merlin had suggested they gather near the fire, but Vera nearly passed out from the mere idea of it. She sweated from the moment she left the water, and her skin burned fiercely. At least the mental fog had mostly dissipated. When she tried to speak, words came. So she told them what she’d seen.
“That was before the final battle,” Arthur said when she got to the scene in the great hall.
Lancelot let out a breath. “Not our best day.”
The memory of Guinevere’s disdain for him came crashing back. “She didn’t like you,” Vera said.
“No,” he said with a sad smile. “She did not.”
“I thought you hardly knew each other,” Vera said. “Why wouldn’t she like you?”
He shrugged, and his eyes glimmered as they flashed to Merlin. “Probably something about being loud and foolish.” Merlin sighed and Lancelot chuckled, but Vera did not entirely buy his unbothered response.
She hesitated before finishing with the memory in their chamber, when Guinevere was bedridden with despair.
“And that was after the battle,” Arthur murmured. She wanted to tell him that she now knew with certainty, having borne witness in this strange way, that there was nothing Arthur could have said to alleviate Guinevere’s pain. They hadn’t felt like her own memories, more like eavesdropping in someone else’s.
“It stopped there,” Vera said.
“That couldn’t have been more than a few weeks before the attack,” Merlin said. “That was more fruitful than I expected. You’re getting close.”
His hunger for answers was plain in his eyes. It matched her own drive. “When can we try again?” she asked.
Lancelot made a strangled sort of noise, but Merlin smiled. “The magic takes a toll. Let your mind rest a few days.”
Lancelot shifted in his seat, ready to argue, but Arthur beat him to it. “You’re not doing that again.”
“I am fine!” Vera protested, a blatant lie. She was sweating. Her voice was weak, especially as she got more worked up. And when she wasn’t actively speaking, she fought to keep her eyes open. “It’s working. We can actually fix this!”
“No,” Arthur said. She wanted to kick him in the shin. It wasn’t bravery to persist, it was necessity. This was her one purpose. This was the reason she existed. She could handle the pain. She had to.
“His Majesty is right,” Merlin said. “Not today.”
“Not bloody ever,” Lancelot mumbled. Vera wanted to kick him, too.
She scoffed, prepared to launch back in.
“I require a private word with Merlin,” Arthur said.
