“I don’t want to talk. I just want to run,” she said, even more frustrated because her voice shook, the words sounding like a plea.
Lancelot pressed his lips together. “All right. You set the pace. I’ll follow.”
It was the coldest winter day yet, but Vera was on fire. She ran harder than usual. They’d barely set out, and her shirt was drenched in sweat. She stopped at the clearing where they usually chatted after their runs, yanked her shirt over her head, and tossed it over a low tree branch.
Now clad in her sports bra and running trousers, Vera turned on Lancelot, daring him to say a word—to laugh or make a joke, but he didn’t. His even gaze met hers unflinchingly. “Better?” he asked.
She nodded bitterly, and they set off. Vera inwardly raged for the first few miles. Arthur must have run to tell Lancelot about the previous evening. Why else would he have been sitting there at her door, all fraught with worry? All along, Lancelot had known things about her life and kept them from her. Come to think of it, he’d probably been telling Arthur what she shared during their runs, too. The resentment pushed her pace.
She huffed angrily, wanting Lancelot to say anything so that she could have a reason to yell at him. He stayed silent, dutifully pounding the same pace as her, right at her side. As the miles wore on, endorphins began to dissolve Vera’s wrath. The fog of her brain lifted enough for her to realize that being angry at Lancelot was simply easier than facing the potion-sharpened experience of the day before.
She called out a peace offering in the last kilometer before their clearing. “Lancelot?”
“Yes?”
“Tree root,” she said, pointing down the trail.
His face broke into a half smile, and Vera gave a winded huff of a laugh. “There you are,” he said with relief.
They came to the clearing and flopped down on the ground. Vera sat closer to him than she would on most days. When she lay on her back, he followed her lead and lay next to her. The sun rose so late in the morning now that it stayed dark their whole time together. Mostly, it was an inky blanket of clouds above them, with brief glimpses of a star twinkling through the gaps. After a stretch of silence, Lancelot spoke.
“I can’t believe you aren’t freezing.”
She’d forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a shirt. Her sweat had barely dried, and the air had only just started to feel cool. “I think I might have had a fever.”
“Gods, Guinna. If that’s how fast you run with a fever—” He stopped speaking abruptly, his face contorting with pain as his hands snapped to his calf. “Oh fuck, that hurts.”
Vera sat up on her elbows, eyebrows raised. “Cramp?” she asked, totally unnecessarily. His calf muscle was visibly seizing into a tight ball under his skin.
He nodded, eyes clenched shut.
“Here.” She rolled onto her side and pressed her thumb firmly on the knot. “You need more potassium.”
“What the hell is that?” He strained to say through his writhing.
“It’s a nutrient in bananas and potatoes—of course, neither of which you have yet,” Vera said with a chuckle as she massaged the knot.
Lancelot moaned his pleasure as his muscle released under the pressure of Vera’s thumb, only making her laugh harder. “It’s a good thing there’s no one around or—”
The leaves over Vera’s shoulder rustled. She and Lancelot froze. They listened as something crashed through the trees, retreating away from them.
He was on his feet in a heartbeat. “Is someone there?” he shouted. The only answer was the whisper of the breeze, distinctly different from the other sound they’d heard. “Shit.” Lancelot palmed his orb, considering it briefly before he heaved it in the direction of the sound. It hung above the undergrowth, alighting a bubble of space around it. “If that were a person, we’d probably be able to see them running off.”
“Probably,” Vera said, more a wish than an agreement. She hadn’t moved from her place on the ground.
He nodded as he seemed to make a decision. “It must have been an animal—no doubt thinking my pathetic cramp noises were a dying rodent for an easy breakfast.” Still, Lancelot grabbed Vera’s shirt from the tree branch and tossed it over to her as he kept his eye on the light in the distance. He stretched his palm to the sky, and the orb zoomed back to him. Neither said aloud what else the noises might have sounded like to someone passing by.
Lancelot sighed, one hand on his hip and the other worrying at his brow. “We need to be more careful.”
“Ugh. That’s exactly what Merlin said.” A flare of annoyance shot through Vera as she hastily pulled her shirt over her head.
“Why would Merlin say that?”
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly.
“No, it’s not.” He crossed his arms and frowned. “I’d say that’s rather something. Since it involves me, I think I have a right to know.”
Vera had a lot to say about everything she felt she had a right to know. Her raised eyebrows said as much, but she held her tongue. “Just all this time together between only the two of us … like Percival said and—and you did sort of look at me all swoony-eyed when I taught you tic-tac-toe.” She tried to keep her voice playful, though she realized her error almost as soon as she’d said it.
