She leaned forward and grabbed his wrist, mastering the urge to cry out from the abrupt movement and instead pouring all she had, all her pain and fear and impotence, into her next words. “Now.” Her voice shook. Her hands shook. “Right now. Either you tell me whatever the fuck it is that you’ve been keeping from me, or I absolutely will go on making myself be fine because I don’t have any other way of surviving.” The exertion left her gasping for breath.
“All right,” he relented, and quickly moved his free hand to cradle the back of her neck. She was ready to berate him for it but nearly collapsed into his grasp. He eased her back down onto the pillow, his eyes holding hers with a strange glint of adoration. But she was dizzy and had to be mistaken.
“You’re right,” he said as he pulled his hands back and dropped his head between them. The logistics of caring for her left him in a posture of supplication, kneeling at her side, his hands clasped on the bed next to Vera with his head bowed. “I’ve been an utter fool.” His face bore no trace of the mask of stone. Now, all she saw was sadness and regret. “I’ve been far worse than that, and I’m so sorry.”
She nestled back into her pillows, unable to contain the groan that escaped her. But she didn’t soften her glare. “How much have you kept from me?”
“Too much.” He said it so quickly that it startled Vera out of her ire. “Everything that matters. It was wrong—”
“Tell me why you need a potion to be near me.” There would be no resting when the offer of truth was on the table.
“I don’t.” Arthur took one shaking breath before he gave in and sat down on the bed next to her, heedless of where blood marred the sheets. “When Viviane attacked Guinevere, and Merlin restarted her essence, there was so much damage that—and I don’t fully understand this—but he wasn’t sure it would work. He was able to get three parts. Three separate pieces of her essence.”
He stopped speaking and held Vera’s stare. Her heart thundered in her chest. “What does that mean?”
“There were three of you,” Arthur said. “Two other versions of Guinevere were restarted when you were. They came back before you.”
All the physical pain, the feelings of dread, even her anger at Arthur—it all abruptly vanished as Vera absorbed his words.
“What—” she began, but all that came out was an unintelligible rasp. She cleared her throat. “What happened to them?”
Arthur looked at Vera with dread-soaked resolve. “They’re dead.”
Vera inhaled sharply.
“It was the same idea as with you,” Arthur continued. “They were raised in another time. Merlin brought the first back a week after Viviane’s attack.”
“Did she remember?” Vera asked.
“She did. Not the attack. She had no recollection of that, but she remembered me after a while, who she was, about her life … And then, it was like something snapped. She became homicidal, almost rabidly so. She attacked me and the soldier who intervened, and she was killed.”
The strange phrasing was not lost on Vera.
“By you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He forged on before Vera could question it further. “At that point, neither Merlin nor I wanted it to be in vain. He insisted we try again. So much about it had been right, and it was new magic. Complicated magic. We couldn’t just give up. Merlin brought the second one back, and she seemed more like herself. She remembered about the same as the first, but she slipped into an even deeper melancholy than Guinevere—Guinevere from before. One morning, she woke …” Arthur’s voice caught. He closed his eyes and swallowed. His cheeks went red as he fought down an onslaught of emotion. He dragged his gaze back to meet Vera’s. “And there was nothing left of her. She was,” he shook his head, “sorrow incarnate.” His eyes flashed to the window. “She jumped.”
It reminded Vera of Matilda, the horror in her eyes when she saw Vera leaning against the window the other night. “And Matilda saw,” she said. She needed no confirmation, though Arthur nodded.
And the pain in his face made her ask, “Were you there, too?”
Arthur nodded.
“You saw it both times?”
“Yes.” He paused. “And the first time, too. After Viviane’s attack.”
Arthur witnessed that horror three separate times. She felt like the wind was knocked out of her. She should have reached out to comfort him, but she sat there, frozen. She couldn’t be sure if it was the story or if the shock was wearing off and leaving her empty, but a dull sick had started churning in her stomach.
“When she fell—jumped,” Arthur amended. “It was more public. People saw it, saw her body. Only from a distance, granted, but there was no denying that some sort of accident had happened. The word spread quickly, and it had to be addressed. That’s where the story about healing at the monastery came from. Merlin wanted to try again right away, and I refused. He agreed to wait a year, which also fulfilled the need for an explanation. Anyone who saw it knew she couldn’t possibly have been all right, not for a long while. Merlin spent that year trying to convince me to change my mind. The time came, and I still refused. I wanted to tell the people that Guinevere died from her injuries and leave you be where you were. Merlin went behind my back and brought you anyway. All I could think to do was to stay as far away from you as possible so that it didn’t end as it had before.” He looked at her apologetically, pleadingly.
“Why are you so convinced that you were the part that broke them?” Vera asked. “The magic went wrong, Arthur. You didn’t do that.”
He was in visible misery, and she knew he only forged on with his eyes locked onto her because he had committed to telling her everything.
“There was a turning point, and it was the same thing. Both times,” he said, “it all went very badly very quickly after she and I were physically intimate. When I saw you last night after Merlin hurt you and you were so,” he searched for the word, “destroyed, I thought it was because of me. I thought that what happened in Glastonbury had … well, it doesn’t matter. I’d have known better if I’d asked or even listened when you tried to tell me.”
“Oh,” Vera said, stunned. “And …” Shit. She had to ask. “If we hadn’t stopped that night, you think that what happened to the others would have happened to me?”
