As she waited for Thomas to draw a breath that would never come, her breathing accelerated. So fast, until it all lodged somewhere between mouth and lungs, useless air hanging in the void.
What the fuck just happened? And for Christ’s sake, why?
Arthur’s sword clattered to the floor as he knelt next to her. He lay a wary hand on her back. It was like Vera had forgotten how to use air. She gasped over and over, barely able to draw in a shallow sip. She hardly felt Arthur’s second hand on her upper arm. Vera turned to him, trying to anchor herself in something breathing, something alive. His face was a blur, an abstract smudge against a backdrop of chaos.
“Guinevere.” She thought he’d said her name. She couldn’t be sure over a riotous ringing in her ears. When had that started?
Vera sat up, her panic rising with her. She’d survived Thomas. She’d killed Thomas, and now she could not breathe. Maybe his last blow to her head was killing her. What if she was bleeding as much as Thomas had, only all of hers was inside her head, causing her brain to swell and forget how to perform basic, life-sustaining tasks?
Vera felt Arthur behind her, his arm reaching under hers and across her torso as he helped her stand. She clutched his forearm to her chest, but she found right away that her legs couldn’t hold her weight. Her knees buckled, and she fell back against him. Her attempts to draw in air grew louder and more frantic by the second.
“I—I can’t breathe,” she choked.
“You’re safe. You’re all right.” Arthur’s voice broke through her panic as he lowered with her to the floor. He leaned back against the wall, knees drawn up on either side of her as he held her to his chest.
“Breathe,” he said, and as if to show her how, he took a deep breath, his chest rising against her back. She tried. She tried so desperately that her nails dug into his arm from the effort.
“I can’t!” She managed to force the words from her.
“You can,” he said as he continued his steady breaths. He spoke more quietly, right next to her ear. “You already are. Slow down. Come on, with me.”
He took another deep breath, but Vera kept struggling. Darkness tugged at the corners of her vision. When Martin and Allison never heard from her again, she hoped they would assume she had found happiness. She prayed they’d never know what happened to her, couldn’t bear the thought that—
“Breathe with me, Vera,” Arthur said, his mouth a thumb’s length from her ear.
Something snapped in place. The next time Arthur’s chest rose, Vera’s joined with it. One full breath of life to soothe her stinging lungs. Her exhale shuddered from her body. Soon, more of her breaths matched Arthur’s rhythm than the discord of hyperventilation. Once she’d calmed to near quiet, Arthur let go of her.
She crawled forward on her hands and knees. Why, she did not know. Maybe the surge of grief and anger and confusion and relief was too much; she needed an island unto herself to release it. Her vision cleared, and the wreckage before her unearthed a guttural and inhuman scream, perhaps from her very soul. Vera curled into a ball on the floor and sobbed. The sounds she heard coming from her body were utterly foreign to her.
And then, she quieted.
“You’re injured,” she heard Arthur say. When Vera shifted to look up at him, the side of her head still against the nightmarishly wet stone floor, he was pulling his bloody fingertips away from the place on his shoulder where the back of her head had rested. He scooted along the floor next to her and tenderly touched the wound on her head. Although she didn’t wince, he withdrew his hand quickly as if aware it hurt her.
“He stabbed me.” Vera’s voice sounded small in her ears.
Arthur shifted to cut off her view of the horrid corpse. He was so out of place here, despite his being the only body in the room dressed for battle. Vera and Thomas were the casualties of war, whereas Arthur’s golden crown shone on his head. The smell of his pristine, unblemished leather armor was as good as potpourri amongst the rusty odor of blood and death.
“I need to get you to your room so we can dress your wounds,” Arthur said.
“I can stand. I’d like to try to walk.” She didn’t want to be helpless, and he did not question her.
After the madness of what happened, she feared she’d find him awash with pity. But in his face, she found only the soldier. He was focused on what needed to be done next, on surviving the right now, and there was no room in his expression for extraneous things like pity. But it wasn’t mechanical.
Arthur inadvertently pressed his fingers against the stab wound at her shoulder as he tried to help her stand, eliciting a pained cry from Vera. He pulled back, and she saw through the clenched squint of her eyes that his hands trembled. If she hadn’t seen it, she wouldn’t have known that he was afraid, too. Arthur rubbed the heels of his hands against his forehead as he took a slow breath before helping her to her feet with restored steadiness.
She leaned her uninjured shoulder into him, and he wrapped his arm around her waist. But Vera’s good shoulder and leg were both on her left side, which made for poor hobbling. She didn’t question Arthur as he led her away from the chapel’s main doors and toward the altar. They turned left into an alcove, and there was a door there, different from the distinguished main entry, simple and small. A monk’s door. She would have remarked on it another day. All that mattered now was that it got her out of here faster.
It led to a path right in the shadow of the castle wall. Arthur tried to quicken their pace once they were in the open air. Vera’s breath hissed through her teeth as the pressure of every step pushed a fresh surge of blood from her thigh. Each footfall on her right side throbbed more than the last. Arthur stopped, casting a sidelong glance at her. She hadn’t realized how much the wound was bleeding. The fabric of her dress was so soaked in blood that it was black. And the slit in her skirt that Thomas carved blew open to her waist in the night breeze. Her whole exposed leg down to the slipper on her foot was a scene from a horror movie.
“Can I carry you?” Arthur asked, his face tense with effort to keep his expression flat.
Vera nodded.
He bent to scoop his free arm beneath her knees. It was silly that she’d even tried to walk. The effort had only weakened her. Now, Vera was cradled in his arms, her blood soaking both of them, and his pace doubled. She tucked her chin, wedging her head in the crook of his neck. Despite the pain all through her body, despite her whole heart being wrecked at what she’d had to do to survive, despite now feeling on the edge of vomiting from the nausea of blood loss, a distracted satisfaction rumbled through Vera at being held by him, curled against his chest. She sobbed anew at it, cursing whatever Merlin had done to her.
Nothing … nothing about this should have felt good.
“I want to go home,” she whispered between sobs.
