Текст книги "The once and future queen"

Автор книги: Paula Laferty

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

It had felt like more than that. Vera dropped her forehead onto the tub’s edge, and Lancelot rubbed the back of her neck. She took a slow and rattling breath. Put it away, she instructed herself. Another deep breath, this one steadier as the memory of what she saw receded. One more breath, smooth and deep. She lifted her head to meet Lancelot’s wary gaze.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Shall we try again?” Merlin asked.

Vera said “Yes,” as Lancelot barked a hard “No.”

“This feels dangerous. I do not like it,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I was asleep,” she insisted. “I’m fine.”

He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

“I have to do this,” she said. “After the last few days, you must understand that.”

She thought he wanted to argue. If he did, he might convince her to change her mind. She didn’t want to do it again, but she had to.

Vera grabbed both of his hands to peel them off of her and firmly placed them on the tub’s wall. “I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll have to do a bit more potion,” Merlin said, “to get you back under.”

Fear lurched in her stomach. “Can we try without it?”

Merlin pressed a second vial into her hand as he answered. “It won’t work. You’ve been touched.”

It was a pointed jab that landed how he’d meant. Lancelot cast his eyes down. She didn’t want him to feel guilty.

“I don’t mind.” Vera drank the second vial’s contents. This time, she didn’t remember lying back and the blindfold was barely over her eyes before the words came. In the final seconds before her consciousness fully evaporated, she felt a swell of trepidation. This was wrong.

She was back in the field. The dying woman only bore the third face: the woman Vera recognized in one breath and felt certain was a stranger in the next. This time, she found herself squinting into the morning sun. Too bright. As she walked toward the woman like before, the grass beneath her feet that before only gently scratched her weathered soles felt sharp as shards of glass.

Come to that, everything was … more than it should have been; colors oversaturated, edges sharper, smells overwhelming.

It was all worse.

When the woman wailed, her screams pierced Vera’s ears to the point that she thought if she reached up, she’d find blood trickling from them. The woman’s fear of death that held her with a sure grip, the woman’s attempts to be brave, her whimpers … it was so unendurable that Vera tried to help far more frantically than before. She tore her skirt to use as a compress, but there wasn’t enough of it—it was only a light summer dress. She pressed it to the wound. The stench of blood was so strong that it covered Vera’s tongue, and she began choking on it and sputtering.

Helpless and defeated, she lay on the ground next to the woman whose breathing crept to a stop until Vera gazed at the empty shell of a human. She closed her eyes. Something else would happen now. It had to. And if it didn’t, Merlin could pull her out. When she opened her eyes, it would be gone.

Vera inhaled through her nose, relieved to smell only fresh air instead of the heavy odor of blood, and opened her eyes.

She was still in the field.

In the spot where she’d started both times before. She turned to look, and there it was.

The woman, her hands on her abdomen. Bleeding.

It was starting over.

There was nothing for Vera to do but live it again, in its new hyper vibrancy that made the scene, already so real, even more so. She was on her knees, clutching at her hair, unsure whether the screams in her ears were hers or those of the poor dying woman.

When the screaming stopped and the smell abated and only the sound of the breeze cut through the air, Vera dared to open her eyes.

Again. In the field. And two times more after that.

It was torture.

The next time, Vera didn’t even stand. She curled into a tight ball on the ground and screamed into the nothingness, into the void of sinking despair that the potion had gone wrong, and she was doomed to relive these awful moments until she lost her mind and there was nothing left of her.

So it came as a shock to Vera when the cycle stopped with the smallest shift.

There was a hand in hers. Like a lost deep-sea diver finding their rope, it led her out of the ill-fated loop. The next moment, Vera was somewhere else.

The hand was still in hers as they walked beside a stream. She couldn’t explain it, but it was like the feel of his hand had a smell, and she knew without having to look it was Arthur. She turned for confirmation and there he was, face taut with nerves as he stared out at the horizon. Vera knew, in a distant way, that they hadn’t known one another long. A glance behind her gave more evidence: her father and Merlin trailed some ways behind them. Chaperones. Merlin’s presence brought a rush of feelings—Guinevere’s feelings. He was the only one she trusted. He was the one who cared for her the way her father never had.

A flash. The stream was gone. They were in the throne room for court. Guinevere had made a comment that Arthur found amusing. He squeezed her hand and gave a sly smile.

Then it was the great hall. Vera recognized the men of the king’s guard gathered around a table in the middle—not the one on the dais, and no one was their usual self. Lancelot slumped in his chair, his head only kept from slamming onto the table by the way it was perched on his hand. His hair was unkempt, and his eyelids seemed to require a great effort to keep open. Vera felt pity, but this wasn’t her memory—it was Guinevere’s. And Guinevere felt the strangest guttural surge of disgust toward him.

Lancelot wasn’t the only exhausted one in the room. Another older man with wavy silver hair, unkempt and hanging loose, dozed in his seat and snored softly there. The ones awake enough bore more severe expressions. Percival chewed at his thumbnail as he looked at a map unfurled before them, and the way his eyes darted to the more senior leaders in the room betrayed his fear. Randall had a ghostly expression of resignation from his spot in the corner. And there were other faces interspersed among the ones she knew so well. Two more men and women at their sides, focused and forlorn. Vera turned to Arthur. He studied the map, too, his face hard and determined. Under the table, though, he’d taken Guinevere’s hand. She rubbed her thumb over the back of it, a gesture of comfort in this moment that tasted of hopelessness.

It was the end of the war—one way or the other, it would all be over soon. They’d withstood innumerable invasions and the largest was yet to come. The faces in this room were a microcosm of Arthur’s forces. Even the best among them had little left to give.

The sense of knowing struck her like lightning. Guinevere knew what to do—Vera could access that in her mind but couldn’t penetrate deeper … couldn’t know the what of her thoughts.

“I have an idea,” Guinevere said. Vera’s voice said.

The room was gone. She lay in bed, and Vera had no context as to why, but she felt what Guinevere felt, and it frightened her. Even in her darkest moment, even the day of—of—ugh. What was his name? She’d loved him and he died. Vera was nauseous as the dualities of her life and Guinevere’s competed within her.

Then the name came to her. Even on the day of Vincent’s death, she had never felt this deep of despair. Arthur sat next to the bed, his hand over hers, eyes filled with regret and an odd glimmer of awe.

The edges dimmed like night was falling on the visions. Vera wondered if that meant the potion’s effect had begun to lose its hold. Blackness closed in from all sides until her mind’s eye was only a pinprick of light at the center—and then nothing. Sensation returned to her waking body.

Vera came up with a spluttering gasp, the last vestiges of the vision gone except one piece which remained: her hand wasn’t empty.

Vera ripped the blindfold off.

Arthur knelt next to the tub, holding her hand, his sleeve wet up to the elbow. Why hadn’t he rolled his sleeve up? Vera’s brain was foggy. Was she still dreaming—remembering—whatever it was?

Water dripped from her soaking hair in quiet splatters, and for a moment it was the only sound. Arthur and Vera stared at one another. She wanted to ask him what he was doing here but couldn’t get the thought into words. Something in her wasn’t working right.

“You are here?” she said with immense effort, surprised by the rasp of her own voice. “How?” Vera swallowed and cleared her throat, which she noticed was sore.

“I—felt like I should be,” he said. His eyes searched her. She didn’t understand why he looked so frightened.

But the other man did, too. Her friend. It was silly, really. Vera couldn’t summon his name. She knew it … of course she knew it. “It was different the second time,” he said. Lancelot. That was his name. “You screamed for half an hour straight.”

Then she noticed Merlin, next to Arthur, nearer her head. A sheen of sweat coated his brow as one pearl broke free and tumbled down his face. She’d not yet seen the mage sweat.

“What happened?” Merlin asked. “Do you remember what was so awful?”

Vera wiped water from her face with her free hand. She did not let go of Arthur. “I—” She meant to tell them about the field and how it wouldn’t stop, but it took so much effort to form words. Too much.

“I felt stuck” was all she could manage.

“You were stuck,” Lancelot said, his eyes uncharacteristically wild and wide, shirt splotched with patches of wet. “We both started trying to pull you out—maybe ten minutes in. Positively shook you, to be honest. Merlin sort of zapped you with magic. You kept screaming. Nothing worked until …” He looked at Arthur.

“His Majesty showed up after we’d tried everything and tried it a second time,” Merlin said. “When he took your hand, you stopped screaming, but you didn’t come out as you should have.” His weary face bore a glint of hope. “Did you remember anything?”

The fog of being in two minds at once was lifting, and for that, Vera’s answer came quickly and assuredly. “Yes. I remembered.”

Dried and dressed, she sat by Merlin’s desk with the three men. Merlin had suggested they gather near the fire, but Vera nearly passed out from the mere idea of it. She sweated from the moment she left the water, and her skin burned fiercely. At least the mental fog had mostly dissipated. When she tried to speak, words came. So she told them what she’d seen.

“That was before the final battle,” Arthur said when she got to the scene in the great hall.

Lancelot let out a breath. “Not our best day.”

The memory of Guinevere’s disdain for him came crashing back. “She didn’t like you,” Vera said.

“No,” he said with a sad smile. “She did not.”

“I thought you hardly knew each other,” Vera said. “Why wouldn’t she like you?”

He shrugged, and his eyes glimmered as they flashed to Merlin. “Probably something about being loud and foolish.” Merlin sighed and Lancelot chuckled, but Vera did not entirely buy his unbothered response.

She hesitated before finishing with the memory in their chamber, when Guinevere was bedridden with despair.

“And that was after the battle,” Arthur murmured. She wanted to tell him that she now knew with certainty, having borne witness in this strange way, that there was nothing Arthur could have said to alleviate Guinevere’s pain. They hadn’t felt like her own memories, more like eavesdropping in someone else’s.

“It stopped there,” Vera said.

“That couldn’t have been more than a few weeks before the attack,” Merlin said. “That was more fruitful than I expected. You’re getting close.”

His hunger for answers was plain in his eyes. It matched her own drive. “When can we try again?” she asked.

Lancelot made a strangled sort of noise, but Merlin smiled. “The magic takes a toll. Let your mind rest a few days.”

Lancelot shifted in his seat, ready to argue, but Arthur beat him to it. “You’re not doing that again.”

“I am fine!” Vera protested, a blatant lie. She was sweating. Her voice was weak, especially as she got more worked up. And when she wasn’t actively speaking, she fought to keep her eyes open. “It’s working. We can actually fix this!”

“No,” Arthur said. She wanted to kick him in the shin. It wasn’t bravery to persist, it was necessity. This was her one purpose. This was the reason she existed. She could handle the pain. She had to.

“His Majesty is right,” Merlin said. “Not today.”

“Not bloody ever,” Lancelot mumbled. Vera wanted to kick him, too.

She scoffed, prepared to launch back in.

“I require a private word with Merlin,” Arthur said.

“Now?” Lancelot raised an eyebrow.

“Right now,” Arthur said as he stood, the motion deeming it final.

And that was that.

They’d been so close to unearthing the truth. How could Arthur not share her urgency? An idea stole through her thoughts, fleeting but present, nevertheless. For the first time, Vera wondered whether he might not want her to remember. And a question came on the thought’s heels: why?

Vera couldn’t get her eyes to focus when she settled into her bed to read that night. She couldn’t have even finished a page before she must have fallen asleep, but she jolted awake when Arthur came in. Before, he’d always gone right to the side room, occasionally with a detour to his desk to pick a new book. But the past two days (God, had it really only been two days?) might as well have been a decade for all that had changed.

When he saw that Vera was awake, he crossed to the bed and sat down on it next to her ankles.

She sat up straighter. This was very new. And … it made her heart flutter. Also new. She didn’t like that. His care after such deliberate avoidance left her with a pathetic sense of longing to be close to him. She would fight it with her frustration.

“I would have been fine for one more go,” Vera said.

“I have no doubt that you are capable of enduring, but that procedure should only be a last resort.” Arthur had a far-off look, the shadow of earlier. For how the three of them had reacted, Vera’s suffering in the tub must have been a jarring sight. “Merlin’s dedication to the kingdom is commendable, but it has skewed his judgment. We must proceed more carefully. He’s going to do more research on how to offset the toll the memory work took on you. We can try after Yule and Christmas.”

“We can’t wait that long!”

He fixed her with a sad, knowing smile. “It’s only two weeks.”

“I—” She was dumbfounded. Vera knew it was winter, obviously. But without checking a phone or computer every day, she hadn’t realized the date.

Arthur parted his lips, inhaling as if to speak, and then shook his head. What was he not telling her?

He looked at the book in Vera’s lap. “The Hobbit?” he asked, surprising her with the change of subject.

She nodded. Of course he recognized it. It was the only book from the desk with a mossy green cover.

“I read all the books Merlin brought for you. At first, to learn more about the world you came from. Selfishly, I just … enjoy them.”

“It’s one of my favorites,” Vera said. “My parents and I used to read it aloud at Christmastime together.”

“Would you like to—?” He gestured sheepishly with the tilt of his head toward her, then toward the book.

Warmth bloomed in her chest. “You want to read it together?”

“I’d like that,” he said.

“All right.”

Arthur started to shift his weight, but he paused. “Would you be comfortable if I sat close to you?”

Vera focused on keeping her expression even despite the way her pulse had jumped. She silently counted to three before she answered. “That’s fine.”

She scooted to the middle of the bed to make room for him to sit next to her. They were shoulder to shoulder, both sitting up and leaning against the headboard.

“We could start at the beginning,” she offered. She’d been partway through.

“No, that’s all right. Let’s pick up where you left off.”

Vera opened The Hobbit to the page she’d marked with the photograph of her and her parents. Arthur ran his thumb across the image.

“That’s you there,” he said. “What is this?”

“It’s a photograph. It’s like …” Vera thought about how to explain it. “It’s like a painting, but it’s made with light using a clever thing called a camera. Someone points it, you press a button, and it takes a picture.”

“Are these your parents?”

“Yes.” He kept staring at the photo, so she went on. “Mum’s name is Allison. Dad is Martin.” There was a pang in her gut at saying his name.

Arthur held it close to his face. “That’s extraordinary,” he said, and then his voice softened. “You look so happy.”

She did. It had been taken after her university graduation some half a year earlier, a girl who would never imagine what was to come sandwiched between Allison and Martin, her arms slung around their necks. Allison gleefully held out Vera’s diploma, and Martin wore her graduation cap lopsided on his head, the tassel dangling down in his face while Vera was caught mid-laugh. She wouldn’t have laughed at all if she’d known about the cancer already growing inside her father on that very day.

“Who made the photo?” Arthur asked.

“Hmm?” Vera said absently.

“You said someone holds the camera and presses a button. Who had the camera?”

She understood why he might be curious. In the photo, Vera seemed like she was staring right through the picture, sharing a private joke with the viewer. Arthur correctly guessed that the moment had been shared between Vera and the photographer.

“I don’t remember,” she mumbled as sadness threatened to overtake her. She felt his eyes on her and deliberately didn’t meet them.

“Shall I start?” she asked, overly brightly.

Vera held the book between them so he could see while she read aloud. Her voice came out more hesitant than it ever had when reading with her parents. But she soon slipped into the story, and out came her voices for each character. At her silliest dwarf voice, Vera felt the deep rumble of Arthur’s laughter reverberating through his shoulder. When the chapter ended, she passed the book to him. He looked at her in confusion.

“It’s your turn.”

Arthur licked his lips and cleared his throat, flustered—but he started reading in his deep timbre. His happened to be the chapter when Gollum showed up. Vera’s jaw fell open in delight as Arthur pitched his voice into a scratchy whisper for the creature.

“That is a splendid Gollum,” she interrupted.

Arthur tucked his chin to his shoulder with a grin. “Aside from my tutor and my parents, I haven’t actually read out loud to anybody.”

“Well, you’re very good at it.”

“My father would be proud,” he said. He found his place and resumed reading.

Arthur’s voice was so soothing. She didn’t remember choosing to close her eyes, nor how her head came to rest on his shoulder. In a half-awake moment of clarity, she realized that her cheek nuzzled into him, but with his steady voice rumbling through her and the heat of his broad shoulder beneath her skin, she couldn’t bear to turn away from such contentment. It almost felt like being with Vincent. She could nearly pretend it. Perhaps he might be able to imagine her as Guinevere—the real Guinevere of his memory. Maybe this would be their way forward … a broken and imperfect way that Vera and Arthur might bring one another comfort.

Eventually, he must have stopped reading. She came around as he was easing her down onto her pillow, and then his weight was gone from the bed. She opened her eyes in time to see him slipping the photo back into the book and setting it on the table before he touched the slab to lower the lights. Vera let her eyes fall shut as she felt the blanket being gingerly laid over her shoulders.

She’d always thought, always assumed, that Matilda was the one who came to check on her during the night, lowering the lights and putting her book away. Now, she wasn’t as sure.

That night marked the start of their careful friendship and an immediate shift in Vera’s life in Camelot.

“It’s probably best to display some affection,” Arthur had said the next day as they headed into town. “May I hold your hand?”

Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest. “That would be fine,” she said.

But by the week’s end, he inclined his head toward her to share private jokes at dinner. She would lay a hand on his arm as she laughed. It was a convincing act partly because there was no pretense in it for Vera. She liked him. His nearness felt like breathing fresh air after being too long in a cellar. And the people of Camelot began to notice.

It wouldn’t all be fixed in a snap, but the change had already begun to undulate out from them. Most of it was surprisingly due to Gawain, who Vera was convinced absolutely loathed her. Lancelot had insisted she was imagining it, but she would swear his scowl darkened with suspicion when he looked at her.

She didn’t have much cause to encounter him, though. Gawain was regularly dispatched to repair magical deficits through Camelot and the neighboring towns. It was a charge he apparently performed well, for the magic complaints in court significantly dropped the next week.

On the loveliest winter morning, Vera and Arthur watched Lancelot and Percival playing a game at the pit as the castle’s cooks prepared ingredients nearby. Yule was two days away with Christmas on its heels, and Vera and Arthur would travel with a small party (as she delightedly learned was customary) to Glastonbury for the Yule festivities the following morning. All seemed right in Camelot. The celebratory boar hunt was underway outside the town walls, and a great horn blasted in the distance, signaling that the party was closing in on the boar. The gates should soon be opened so they could parade the carcass back to the cook site.

Margaret, the head chef at the castle who was sweet and grandmotherly about all things except for the business of running the kitchen, paused her onion chopping at the sound.

“They’ll be back with the beast soon,” she said, gazing off in the general direction. “I thought we’d have a bit longer.” She wiped her hands on her apron and left her chopping post, calling out as she went. “Oy! Call up the butcher’s boy to magic up the meat. Let’s get the fire stoked for the spit!” She gave one final shout over her shoulder, “And for the love of God, someone finish chopping that veg!”

Vera looked to her left and right. All the other castle staff were already occupied. She wasn’t sure anyone else had heard Margaret’s orders.

She left the wall of the pit without a word to Arthur, stepped up to the vacant spot at the table, and took up the knife. She’d not chopped even a turnip in months, but years of kitchen work at the George were not so easily forgotten.

“Should I be alarmed at your proficiency with a blade?”

She broke her focus only momentarily to find that Arthur had left his spectator spot and was watching her instead.

Vera laughed. “I was trained by the best.”

He tilted his head and raised his eyebrow.

“My mum,” she explained, surprising herself by sharing so readily. She’d mostly avoided any conversation about her parents and certainly hadn’t willingly brought them up before now. “She had me chopping veg before it was wise to put a knife in my hands. I take it your mother didn’t recruit you in the kitchen?”

The moment the question cleared her lips, she wanted to pull it back in. His smile hadn’t fallen, nor his shoulders tensed, but there was something inscrutable that shifted in him and made Vera feel sure she’d touched a tender place.

“No,” he said, and he dropped his gaze to the table as he rolled a bulbous white onion beneath his palm. Just like that, the shadow fell from his features. “Care to teach me?”

“Don’t you want to watch the game?” She nodded at the pit, trying to give him a kind excuse to walk away. But he didn’t budge.

“We can see from here.” His eyes glimmered a little as his lips tipped to a smile. She found she couldn’t look away from them. She was struck by the realization that Arthur knew very well what it was like to kiss her. He knew the taste of her lips when she had no idea the taste of his.

She shoved the thought away as she found an extra knife for him and began showing the proper chopping technique as Allison had once taught her. He wasn’t accustomed to being so close to onion fumes and tears streamed down his cheeks in seconds, reducing them both to fits of laughter before Vera swapped his onion out for a cabbage.

People had begun watching them, pointing at the king and queen preparing vegetables for the town’s dinner. Grady waved to her as he passed by with one of the newly broken horses. She smiled and inclined her head, grateful for the friendly face. Chopping veg for dinner wasn’t exactly a proper royal activity, which nearly gave Vera pause, but Arthur was with her. Anyone watching saw that they were having fun, that he was being so warm—ah.

It hit her with a pang. The flirtation was an effective show.

It wouldn’t have bothered her if she stupidly hadn’t been swept up in it. He was far too charming.

When the sound of a horn cut through the air again, she was lucky her knife didn’t slip. It sounded again, only this time, it stopped mid-blast.

What happened next all went very quickly. Vera wouldn’t have seen anything amiss except that her eyes were already on Lancelot in the pit when his expression hardened. He stopped playing and, trancelike, climbed onto the pit’s wall, holding a post as he balanced on the slim ledge. No one reacted much at first save for askance glances at him.

“Two blasts means the hunt’s over,” Arthur said, but he also stared up at Lancelot. “They’ll open the gates over there.” He gestured in the direction Lancelot was looking, where there was an expansive field between Camelot’s wall and the forest. “So the party can parade into town with their prize.”

But Lancelot was shaking his head. Arthur set his knife down and went to Lancelot’s side. Vera followed.

“That blast didn’t sound right,” he murmured.

“What do you mean?” Arthur asked.

“I don’t know … just … Arthur, I think you should have them close the gates.”

Arthur didn’t hesitate to ask questions. He flagged Percival down and sent him running for the town’s wall. It wasn’t far, only down the lane and around the corner.

But they were already too late.

“Shit!” Lancelot jumped down from the ledge as a cacophony of shouting rose from where Percival had disappeared. “The hunt’s not over. The bloody boar’s gotten loose. It’s within the wall.”

All at once, everything was in motion.

“Get inside!” Arthur bellowed.

He and Lancelot shouted repeated warnings as Arthur scooped up a fallen child and passed him to a frantic mother, and Lancelot sprinted to where they had left their swords, but they were out of time. He had barely lain a finger on the hilt of his weapon when the furious beast rounded the corner and pummeled through the square.

Vera gasped. She couldn’t have guessed how fast and ferocious a boar would be. It was no pig. It was closer to the size of a bull, and its eyes were so wide in rage that they were more whites than pupils. It trampled past her, near enough that she could see that its black hair was coarse and oily, that it had worked up a lather around its mouth, and that its short tusks were wickedly sharp. Arthur jumped down next to her, able to do nothing more than take hold of her arm as the boar thundered by them. The panicked shouts mostly came from inside houses as, mercifully, most people in the square had gotten to safety.

Percival rounded the corner, sword drawn, shield ready. Lancelot was already sprinting toward the boar when it skidded to a halt. Even if he’d had a spear in hand, ready to throw, he was too far to get enough power to pierce its hide. And anyway, he didn’t have one. None of the armed warriors running after the beast did.

Lancelot’s gait stuttered to an unexpected stop. Vera heard the horse’s whinny before she followed the boar’s grunting stare to see it. Grady had one arm around the newly broken stallion’s neck, the other clutching its lead with all his might, but the barely trained horse’s terror was far more powerful than a fourteen-year-old boy’s grip. The horse reared up on its hind legs, sending Grady tumbling backward onto his bottom with a grunt. Freed from his grasp, the horse galloped away at full speed, leaving Grady alone and dazed on the ground, stuck in a corner between two buildings on either side and a frothing monster in front of him.

“Grady!” Arthur shouted. The boy looked up at once, eyes searching for Arthur but first finding the boar and widening. Arthur, armed with absolutely nothing, tore toward him, but there was no way he would get to Grady in time. Lancelot was closest. He wouldn’t get there either.

The boar snorted. And again. And again—in a quickening rhythm like a battle drum before it charged. Grady scrambled backward until he could scramble no further when his back hit the wall behind him. He raised his arms helplessly in front of his face.

Oh God. She couldn’t watch, but she couldn’t turn away. Vera dropped to her knees with a cry, not feeling the sting of rocks digging into them, only a rush of burning sensation over her skin that did not come from the winter air. Even if Grady didn’t know she was there, even if it was horrendous, Vera would not look away. She would not abandon him to die without someone who cared for him at least bearing witness. A distant part of her noted what a dismal thought this was, but the heat raging through her scorched it to ash.

When the boar was about to slam into him, when Grady should have been taking his last breaths, there was something else. It started at Grady’s chest and exploded out from there—a blue-white disk of light that burst from him with a colossal exhale of wind, so powerful that the boar was tossed in the air like a rag doll, thrown onto its back. The explosion sent a shockwave like a string threaded through them all, stretched tight and thrummed. If the beast hadn’t been stunned by the impossibility of what had happened, it still would have struggled to find Grady.

Every loose piece of wood, be it the handle of a tool, a spare board, or even a wagon for hay, zipped toward Grady and formed a wall in front of him. It gave Lancelot and Percival time to get to the dazed boar and swiftly end it.