Vera covered her mouth to stifle her gasp. He was talking about her. He had shoved his friend, his king, and shouted at him in defense of her.
Arthur halfheartedly pushed Lancelot’s arm away from him. “I am poison to her,” he said.
“Oh, bullshit!” Lancelot threw his hands in the air. Vera had never seen him so angry. She thought he might punch Arthur as he wheeled on him. “Bullshit! You aren’t protecting her. This isn’t noble. What you’re doing now—this is poison. Carry on like this, and we will lose her again. And this time,” he added, his finger shaking as he pointed it at Arthur. “It will be your fault. You’ll never forgive yourself.” His last words were as good as a scathing slap. The two men stared at one another in fuming silence. Lancelot shook his head. “I’ll never forgive you either.” He turned and strode back in the direction he’d come from.
Vera had never had a best friend before and hadn’t realized until she saw that look in Lancelot’s eye that she had one now.
She backed into the nook and waited for the sound of Arthur’s retreat but heard nothing. She began to wonder if he’d left, and somehow, she hadn’t noticed. Vera peeked around the corner of her hiding spot as an exhaled whisper of “Fuck,” echoed through the hall. With the word, he was in motion, pacing back and forth, his hands on his head. Vera held her breath when he stopped.
“Fuck!” Arthur roared it so loudly that Vera started. He stood motionless enough that the darkness seemed to swallow him until he, too, followed where Lancelot had gone.
Vera’s anger at Lancelot melted away, and—Arthur? Well, she didn’t know what to make of that.
She hurried to the chapel where her stitching was a balm, though she didn’t sing or hum this evening and kept the lights dim. She was continually staggered by how comforted she was by the statue of Mary. Vera sat with her back against the wall, and her right shoulder leaned against the pedestal beneath the statue. She fished out her embroidery, a butterfly this time, and set in on a large wing section with bright blue thread. Vera must have been at it for some time because she’d made good progress when the main door to the chapel opened, jolting her from admiring her piece.
He was a silhouette against the night until he stepped into the room and pulled the door closed behind him.
“Thomas,” Vera said, recognizing him quickly and relieved at first that it was a familiar face before something nagged at her. She’d run into him yesterday, hadn’t she? While she was damn near out of her mind. What had she said to him? It hadn’t been friendly.
Evidently, he wasn’t angry because he spoke to her warmly. “I hoped you’d be here,” he said as he leaned against the door behind him and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry if I was harsh yesterday,” Vera said, setting her embroidery in her lap. “I was unwell.”
Thomas walked toward her, and Vera felt a tug of guttural warning. She couldn’t identify right away what set it off, but as he drew near, his step hitched on its momentum, and he stumbled.
Vera stiffened as he sat beside her, a touch too close for comfort.
He leaned his head against the wall, chin raised, and eyes closed. “It might be fate—you being here right now.”
Vera smelled the unmistakable stench of drink on his breath, and when his eyes lolled open, she saw the signs of it there, too. His pupils were too large. Staring into their unnatural darkness brought the sinking realization that what Vera took for warmth at a distance was more accurately inebriation. She pursed her lips, considering her options of what she could say or do, of how she could leave without causing a fuss. How many times had she been alone with Thomas? He’d never done anything untoward. It reassured the now screaming alarm within her. She was safe here.
“The festivities have interfered some with my chapel visits, but I’m not so sure about fate,” she said as she resumed her stitching. She leaned away from him against the holy mother’s pedestal. “I’m here many evenings.” Vera’s hands were shaking. She hoped he wouldn’t notice the embroidery hoop shuddering.
“Not the mornings, though,” Thomas said.
There was accusation in his tone. She trained her eyes on the quivering, partly formed butterfly in her hands and forced her hands to keep moving, for the needle to pierce the fabric. She had to grab at it twice before her fingers successfully pinched around it and was midway through her next shaking stitch when his voice bit into her.
“I saw you,” he said. Vera’s eyes flicked upward to meet his. “I saw you and Sir Lancelot together this morning.”
Her breath stopped. He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have. It had been an animal.
“I saw you,” Thomas’s voice was eerily sing-songy, “and I heard you.”
Vera shook her head quickly back and forth, the tiny negation was all she could manage. She instinctively knew she’d never been in more peril than she was right now.
“Thomas, that wasn’t what you think, it—”
“I believed you were different. Loyal. But even those chosen by the Lord may fall to evil ways,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “I thought you were a gentle lady and I the lustful sinner.”
Vera squeezed her embroidery more tightly. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“But I see it now,” Thomas said. “Your temptations are ceaseless. You must be stopped.”
The needle slipped and stabbed into her palm, lodging in her skin like an arrow buried in its target. She yelped as she wrenched her hand free from its point. A thick, shining drop of blood bloomed there and dropped from her palm onto a yet-white spot on her butterfly’s wing, a steady trickle following behind it.
Thomas grabbed Vera’s hand with both of his, and the startling swiftness of his movement froze her. His ravenous eyes fixed on the eruption of blood from her wound. Then he wrenched her hand to his mouth and sucked the blood off her palm.
Vera hadn’t made any choice to act before she was in motion. Leveraging her free hand on the pedestal next to her, she pushed herself to her feet, intending to pull free from his grasp and run like hell, but Thomas’s firm grip stayed her. He yanked her back with such startling force that the next thing she knew, she was face-down on the floor on Thomas’s other side.
