It was back to the essential question, then. “How long would I be gone?”
“You cannot touch any time that you’ve already lived, so I couldn’t bring you into your past here, but I can deliver you back to Glastonbury after the moment we depart this evening,” Merlin said. “I do not wish to mislead you; there is risk. I can’t bring you back unless you’ve—until you’ve helped us fix what’s broken. That is imperative. Whether or not you decide to come with me is your choice.”
“And if I choose not to come, what happens?” Vera asked.
He heaved a sigh and stared down at the table before he met her gaze. “Time is,” he clicked his tongue as he searched for the words, “immeasurably complicated. But the present as you know it is contingent upon you, upon your life and your actions … upon your returning to where you came from. If you stay here, the kingdom will fall. And I can’t say how soon or the way it will happen, but this time, this life as you know it will eventually cease to be.”
“You call that a choice?” Vera gaped at him. “Fuck. I have a life here. I’m—” She gestured around at the pub. What was she going to say? Cleaning toilets and changing bedsheets? “I’m happy.”
“I’m sorry,” Merlin said. “If it weren’t for this, death was the alternative. You would have died the day you were injured and lived none of this life. This was the best I could give you.”
Allison had managed to stave off a steady stream of tears, but her eyes were rimmed in red from the fight. “I have to go, don’t I?” Vera said. Part of her hoped Allison would so staunchly object that the choice would be made for her.
“You do, my love,” she said as she took Vera’s hand in both of hers. “I love you to the end of the world.” Allison tried to continue, but her voice faltered. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Listen to me. You are not happy. And this is not a life. I want better for you.”
It stung, but it was true enough. She hadn’t been happy since Vincent died. She hadn’t quite been able to slip back into herself, and Martin and Allison had seen that. In that way, Merlin’s timing was a gift. Vera couldn’t escape her memories of Vincent anywhere here, though she’d tried. She’d fled from Bristol, where they’d met, where they’d fallen in love, where they’d lived together, and where he died … back to Glastonbury.
She fled up the Tor nearly every morning. She fled into the regularity of cleaning rooms and serving breakfasts. No matter the distance or distraction, pain caught up and claimed her. She was typically good at tucking away hard things, shoving them beneath the place her conscious thought and feeling would reach, but this … this wouldn’t go away.
It all only compounded with Martin’s diagnosis just months ago. Vera had taken on the weight of his treatment schedule in a way she knew wasn’t healthy. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of his healing as her responsibility.
And she knew why. When it came to Vincent, she couldn’t escape the truth of her culpability. When his car skidded off the road and careened into a tree as he came home from the pub quiz, she had been asleep on the sofa. He’d bled in a ditch for nearly two hours before someone found him. It was too late by then. Vera usually went to the weekly pub quiz with him but had stayed home that night because she was tired. If she’d been there, she could have gotten help. Even if she hadn’t dozed off on the damn couch, she’d have realized he never got home. She’d have phoned the police. He wouldn’t have died.
Vera got to the hospital before they lost him. It haunted her that she hadn’t forced her way through the emergency department to get to him. She let him die surrounded by strangers.
And now, she was helpless as her father wasted away, day by day, with nothing she could do but watch.
Fourteen hundred years was a long way to run from her guilt. But they needed Guinevere’s memories, and evidently, Vera had them. Maybe … maybe if she could fulfill this purpose, maybe if she could be the vessel that they needed, maybe—what? It wouldn’t bring Vincent back.
But maybe you could forgive yourself.
How many lives would Guinevere’s locked-up knowledge save? Surely, surely that deed could absolve her, and she could go back to her unnoticeable life. Her father’s treatments would work (they had to work), and loss like Vincent’s wouldn’t be at stake. She could climb the Tor or read a book or stare at the stars and feel cheerful without being shredded by pain.
Vera laughed a little madly. She never dreamed she’d yearn to clean sheets for the rest of her life, but there was a simple joy to be found there. And if she had to travel fourteen hundred years and unearth some lost important woman’s memories to reclaim it—so be it.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Allison shifted in her seat and spoke up sheepishly. “I hate to think of this, but what should we do when people notice she’s gone?”
“They won’t notice. It’s been part of the spell—part of what made it possible for Vera to be here for so long,” Merlin said. “Have you ever noticed the way people interact with her?”
Allison caught Vera’s eye as she nodded. They’d only had conversations about it when she was little—and never since. She had cried about not having friends and her mum soothed her, stroking her hair, telling her it was normal to feel uncertain and insecure.
“I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening,” Allison murmured. “After a while, though, it became rather undeniable.”
She couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that her mother had noticed all along, but the admission stung as a betrayal that Vera swallowed. She didn’t want to leave angry with her mother.
“They forget you here,” Merlin said to Vera. “But no one has forgotten Guinevere in our time. You won’t be ignored or dismissed there. It’s where you belong.” He tugged the chain of his pocket watch, lifting it from his pocket to peek at its face. “The voyage is possible until sundown. We have an hour and thirty-four minutes.” He picked up a satchel from the floor next to his seat and passed it to Vera. “You’ll want to change into this before we go.”
She opened it and peered inside. All she could see was green fabric. A dress, she presumed.
An hour and a half wasn’t nearly enough time to prepare, let alone say goodbye to her parents.
Shit.
Vera craned her neck to get a glimpse of the door as if looking would make her father materialize. Martin was in hospital in London for two more days. She’d been planning to leave first thing in the morning to sit with him during his treatment.
It was a three-hour drive.
