Текст книги "The once and future queen"
Автор книги: Paula Laferty
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
The dark behind Vera’s eyelids swelled to an abnormal vastness that she intuitively understood to be some part of her mind. Everything beyond her mind, even her physical body, felt more like a dream.
“What are you looking for?” She asked it silently, testing her sense that Merlin couldn’t hear her active thoughts. He didn’t answer.
She felt his presence meandering through her memories, but there was no image of him, nothing to see. He wasn’t in her active, thinking mind. His foreign presence was solely in her memories. Merlin moved like he knew where he was going. There was a distinct tug toward one sensation: affection.
He pulled it forth like taking a book from a shelf. Then, images flipped past in quick succession, slides of memory scrolling past until the Rolodex slowed. The first thing that came into focus replayed as Vera remembered it: Arthur holding her as they danced before the crowd and laughing as he called out the moves to her—God, how had that just been yesterday? She thought Merlin might stop there. That seemed a good place to begin, but he flipped past it.
Next was Lancelot. Short scenes in quick succession: him kissing her on the forehead in the throne room, nudging her with his shoulder on the hillside, laughing with her while on a run. Not all her memories with him went by, but there were so many: throwing his hands in the air in glee that first night, running toward the woods the day they went to the sacred grove … Vera deliberately moved away from this one, realizing that she had some control if Merlin was aimlessly flipping through. Instead, she pulled forth one when they’d played tic-tac-toe and saw the adoration on his face in her memory.
“Guinevere,” Merlin said disapprovingly. His physical voice sounded like it came from the farthest point of a jet-dark pit. “You need to be careful.”
“It’s not like that,” she said, but he’d already moved on before she could offer more of a rebuttal. She chuckled despite her discomfort. What would he have said if he saw them half-naked in the cave together?
Merlin blazed onward, further back in her memories, back to university. This couldn’t be right. This was too long ago. It was the beginning of Vera’s third year, and she remembered this day in particular. The stormy day when she’d met Vincent in the library. It all played out as she remembered. It hurt to look at him in this memory, so full of life and light. He had no idea … no trace of fear at what was to come for him and what would be his end.
Vera’s immersion in the memory broke. It lay open in front of her, but the focus shifted. Darkness fell like the power to her mind was cut, and a loud ring in the obscurity of the black shook her as if she stood inside a church bell being struck. The tone made her seize up. Merlin had promised there’d be pain, and that was the first sign of it.
“Keep breathing,” he said, his steady voice easing Vera some.
An incision sliced into the darkness, and a memory was born into her mind through it, but it wasn’t hers. She was seeing it from someone else’s perspective. The emotions that came with it were foreign. They had to be Merlin’s. They had no home in her and experiencing them stung. The new memory shimmered into focus, and Vera saw Guinevere from Merlin’s perspective.
Something of Merlin’s context mystically transferred to Vera, and she knew she was watching Guinevere and Arthur’s first meeting. She radiated nervous joy as she curtsied in front of him. There was her father not two steps behind Guinevere, severe even as he smiled, looking on as she passed Arthur a gift. She couldn’t tell what the gift was from her vantage point—from Merlin’s vantage point, she corrected herself. Guinevere and Arthur shifted, and Vera couldn’t see her face well, only his. Beaming, he passed the gift straight to Lancelot and took both of Guinevere’s hands in his. He kissed the top of one.
Merlin’s emotions flooded Vera in full force. Relief and joy. Guinevere and Arthur—the hope for the kingdom.
It wasn’t so bad now that she was used to this memory. Merlin maneuvered the whole of it to nestle against the one of Vincent. They fit nicely there together. A bit of what Vera felt that first day for Vincent leaked into the new memory, spilling over and recoloring her affection for Arthur.
Then, there were emotions that weren’t Merlin’s nor Vera’s own, but they, too, came crashing into her mind. It was Merlin’s understanding of what Guinevere felt: affection and attraction. He inserted it with the rest, making one misshapen package. That part hurt a little more. Vera gripped the arms of her seat and exhaled a stiff, shaking breath. The lumpy memory settled in with the rest, and Merlin backed away from it. She unclenched her muscles as the pain eased.
They were on the move again in Vera’s memories, shuttling past them in a blur. They flashed by as the scenes with Lancelot had: Vincent’s fingers on hers under the table at a bar—this one from right before they officially started dating, dancing at Vincent’s sister’s wedding, and finally one of her last memories of him. Merlin stopped.
Vera and Vincent lay in their bed in Bristol. His hand traced swirls across her bare stomach in a way that made her back arch, half tickled, half stirred into a gleeful lust. It was too intimate. She didn’t want to remember this, and she sure as hell didn’t want anyone else seeing it. And Vera couldn’t forget that this was her last night with Vincent before he died—just last June. Barely half a year ago. She’d deliberately not thought of this, and while she could savor its goodness forever, it was tainted by the story’s ending.
She tried to put it away the way she had with the sacred grove, but Merlin was laser-focused as if he’d been looking for it, and it didn’t budge.
In the memory, she rolled into Vincent, and he buried his face into her neck. “I can’t believe I get to love you,” he’d murmured, raising goosebumps that raced over her skin.
She’d laughed. She’d gazed into his warm brown eyes, rich with earnestness and delight, and before she could say a word, his lips were on hers in no need of any verbal reply. The way Vera’s hips curved into him, the depth of her kiss, and the joy that emanated from her movements were enough.
A tear squeezed past her closed eyelid and rolled down her cheek in the murky pit of the world outside Vera’s mind. Merlin mercifully set the memory aside, present but no longer the focus.
Darkness fell before the sting of a new incision scorched through. Light shone in, unwelcome. The image shimmered like before and sharpened into focus. Guinevere and Arthur again, but it was wrong. Immediately, she could sense it was wrong. It was a private moment.
They stood atop the castle wall where Vera had only ever seen guards. She’d never thought to try to access it, but she saw it all through Merlin’s eyes from where he stood, concealed in the nearest guard tower. Vera could feel his guilt at watching them in secret.
Guinevere’s arms were spread wide along the wall’s stone rail, her head bowed between them. Her hair hung loose and tangled. She was in an off-white shift dress, the kind Vera had been wearing as a nightgown. Arthur stood next to her. He reached a hesitant hand to her shoulder, and she yanked away at his touch.
Vera gasped at her expression: that of a cornered animal, knowing it’s finished. There wasn’t any fight in it. Arthur approached her accordingly, his hands out before him with his palms up.
“Please,” he said, reaching out toward her but not closing the last six inches between them. “Please, let me help you.”
It was Guinevere, her shoulders falling, who grabbed his hand like it was a life raft and pulled into him, stiff against his chest. Arthur closed his arms around her. He held her until she leaned back from him, the wild look replaced with something Merlin saw as being calmed but that Vera recognized more intimately as resignation.
Her stomach churned as Guinevere hooked her hand behind Arthur’s neck and kissed him, desperation in her taut limbs. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled for dear life. He yielded to the tug, sinking into her kiss as he stumbled forward.
Merlin’s relief came in a flood. He believed it was a show of love. He saw devotion. He inserted his interpretation of Guinevere’s feelings—love, gratitude, and yearning. But this woman who was so identical to Vera felt like she was a sister Vera had never met, and Vera knew better. It was wrong for Arthur, too. His eyes flickered open, and they were wrought with worry, not love. Not even arousal.
What Vera experienced in her body wasn’t pain at first. Discomfort, certainly. Nausea, absolutely. It wasn’t so bad, and if it worked to bring Guinevere’s memories in union with her mind, it would all be worth it.
It hit like a boulder dropped on her head from above; sudden, unexpected, and with blinding pain. It set fire to Vera’s lungs—every bit of her skin hurt. There wasn’t a place on her body that wasn’t in burning torment: eyes, scalp, even her tongue.
Then she understood why. Merlin was trying to combine this memory with the tender one of Vincent. He pressed them together as he’d done with the other. Maybe it was because the emotions of it weren’t even close to being genuinely parallel or because there was so much pain in both memories. It was agony beyond anything Vera had ever known. This was what torture felt like.
It only got worse. The memory wouldn’t stick. Merlin pushed harder.
“Stop!” she screamed, barely able to find the breath for it.
He paused but didn’t release her. Merlin maneuvered his memory around hers, prowling the edges and searching for a way in.
“We’re so close,” he mumbled.
He pushed, and Vera whimpered. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said frantically, expecting him to pull away as her tears flowed. He’d promised he would stop.
He began pulling the memory back. “Almost there,” he said.
Vera realized too late that Merlin was only moving back to build momentum. The calm lasted two breaths before the foreign memory came hurtling toward her own, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. It smashed into Vera’s memory with such force that she screamed in a way she hadn’t done since she was a child, with all the power she could muster from her aching lungs. The new memory shoved so violently against the old one that she thought she would shatter from the pressure. There couldn’t be a pain worse than this. In the midst of that unrelenting anguish, she would have been relieved to die.
But her chest continued to rise and fall. She tried to moan, but there was no air in her. Merlin relentlessly shoved against her memory.
And then it happened.
She didn’t shatter, but the memory of Vincent did. The shards of it exploded and impaled her mind in all directions.
Vera gasped in one agonizing lungful of air and shouted with all the force of her body a snarling “No!” as she snapped her eyes open. She heard a thud and clatter on the floor behind her. She hadn’t realized that she’d sprung to her feet in the same motion, freed from Merlin’s grasp. She spun to find him on his back on the floor behind her, uninjured and rising to his elbows. She took ragged, furious, horrified breaths and glared at him.
The implications of her shattered memory seeped into her. She knew what it was, knew she’d been in her bed with Vincent. She could remember his name, but the memory itself—the image, the details, the feelings—they were all rapidly fading like a dream that slipped away on waking. Water already down the drain.
Most horrifying, Vincent’s face was gone. Just gone. His image had been erased not only from this memory but from all of her memories. She knew who he was; she could even describe his features, but it was a poor rendition, a sketch an artist makes after a frantic witness describes the assailant. It was not him.
“Did you know?” Vera snarled. “Did you know what it would do to my memory?”
She hoped he’d say no. She silently begged him to, but he only stared at her. It was as good as a confession.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, her hands flinging to her head, gripping her hair. She’d never asked him if the procedure was safe. Never thought to ask if there’d be loss. “You’re a fucking psychopath!”
When Vera wheeled on him, he was rising to his feet and had the nerve to act disappointed. “I thought you understood how dire our situation—”
“I do! But all I had left of him was memory—” Her traitorous voice broke, and Vera clenched her teeth to steady her breath. “He was the only one outside of my parents who could slip through this fucking curse and know me.” She’d never wanted to hit someone so badly, yet her whole body quaked. Her fury took all her energy. She had to drop one hand to the top of the desk to steady herself. “What happened to stopping if I said stop?”
“It needed to work,” Merlin said without apology. “I didn’t want you to have to do that again.”
“Oh, I’m not doing it again. You want Arthur to connect with me? Fuck with his brain. I’m done.” Vera stormed to the door, feeling emptier than ever.
“Guinevere—”
Vera turned to glare at him from the doorway. “I thought being brought back to bear a child would have been the worst thing you could have done to me. But you gave me a whole goddamn life to fatten me up with parents who loved me and with Vincent, who—” She stopped and swallowed heavily. “And for what? So I’d have more to sacrifice in exchange for Guinevere’s memories?”
Merlin stared at her in silent sorrow.
“You should have let Viviane kill me.” Vera slammed the door behind her and did not look back.
Vera didn’t realize how long she’d been in Merlin’s study until she emerged from the cellar expecting daylight and finding it was dusk. The sounds of dinner from the great hall drifted to her on the breeze. She hoped it meant she wouldn’t run into anyone on her way to her room, but luck was against her. She’d been staring at the ground and looked up barely in time to avoid running head-on into Thomas. She stumbled backward and would have fallen if he’d not caught her at the elbow.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her vision swam as she tried to focus on him and pretend to be fine.
It didn’t work. “What’s happened, Your Majesty?” His voice pitched up with concern. “You look unwell.”
She wished he’d let go of her arm. She tried to pull away, but he held fast. It was probably keeping her upright, though.
“You’re near to swooning,” Thomas said. She was close to passing out, but the way he said it added a flare to her anger. “I’ll get the king.”
“No, please don’t—”
“You need your husband,” he insisted.
“I don’t,” Vera said through gritted teeth.
“I—I can help you, my queen.” Thomas’s fingers dug painfully into her arm, and Vera wrenched away from his grasp.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she snarled.
He recoiled, looking at her like she was a stranger. His mouth opened and closed like a fish before he swallowed heavily and took a hesitant step aside, allowing Vera to pass.
The pain and exhaustion only continued to mount as the initial shock faded. She was in such physical agony that she barely made it to her room, collapsing to the floor after she closed the door behind her. Vera had no idea if she stayed there minutes or hours before she realized she was drenched in sweat and crawled the length of her chamber to her window. Somehow, she fumbled the shutter open so she could lean her cheek against the cold dowels and let the evening wind lash at her face. For a while, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep sitting there by the window, but all she could see were Guinevere’s hands clawing at Arthur’s shirt, and all she felt was the void of the destroyed memory. The one truly born in love, replaced by fear and desperation.
She remembered every second of her time in Merlin’s study and felt like she would melt into nothing. It was too much. She leaned her full body weight against the window’s bars, eyes open and unfocused. It would have been all right if the bars didn’t hold, and she fell. She knew she wouldn’t feel that way in the morning, but the pain of right now ravaged her.
When the door opened, Vera didn’t notice. The sound of conversation between friends, so out of place, brought her vision back into focus. She turned in time to watch the light dying in Arthur’s eyes as they locked on her. Matilda was with him, and her face fell next.
He stepped toward Vera and stopped, looking helplessly at Matilda. She nodded and set right into action.
“Let’s get you to bed,” she said. It was a different tone than Vera had grown used to, the one quick to a smile or a joke. She spoke with the purpose of someone who’d dealt with such a crisis before.
“I’m fine,” Vera mumbled.
“Yes, well, all the same.” Matilda took her hand with a frightened smile. Vera allowed Matilda to help her down and to the bed without objection, if nothing else, because it seemed to make her friend feel better.
“I’ve got her,” Matilda said over her shoulder. Vera turned her head, but it was more of a lolling roll of her neck. She didn’t quite have control over her body.
Arthur stood there, fists clenched at his sides, frozen between staying or going. He met Vera’s eyes and took one shaking breath before he turned and left, not to the side door but back into the corridor. She didn’t bother to guess where he went from there. She couldn’t focus. It still felt like shards were stabbing all through her brain.
As Matilda helped her change into her nightgown, her hand brushed Vera’s face. She gasped. “You’re burning up!”
Vera noticed a cold rag on her forehead as she drifted into unrestful oblivion.
She woke from what must have been a dozen nightmares before the sun rose, skin stinging like she had a sunburn, sick like she was hungover, but her mind was clearer, and she had an unbearable urge to move. She didn’t even care if Lancelot showed up today. They hadn’t confirmed their run, but Vera would go on her own if needed.
When she opened the door, she nearly tripped over him. Lancelot sat right outside her room, on the floor with his knees up.
“Hey,” he breathed with a mix of relief and worry. Vera wondered what medieval greeting was translating via magic to “hey” even as a twinge of annoyance rang through her at his concern.
“Ready?” she said stiffly.
She didn’t wait for an answer. She started toward the stairs and let him scramble to catch up. His eyes flitted to her every few steps. Vera ignored them.
“Is everything—”
“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.
Lancelot cocked his head to the side, the smile gone from his eyes. “Merlin wasn’t there for that. Did you tell him?”
“I—well—”
“Because if you didn’t, I’m not sure who did.”
“No, I—”
“Then who did?” He wasn’t giving her time to think.
“No one! He saw it when—” The mental fog from earlier was creeping back in. “I sort of showed him. I didn’t mean to.”
“All right.” His eyes softened as he watched her struggle through it. He sat back down and patted the ground next to him. “Out with it, you.”
Vera sank to the dirt beside him. She told him nearly everything: that she knew about Guinevere’s betrayal with Viviane, her desperation to get her memory back, the potions, and the horrid procedure Merlin had tried. That he’d seen how close Vera and Lancelot had grown. She hesitated when she got to Vincent’s part, but only for a second, making a gut decision to trust him with the whole story. He’d laid his free hand on her knee, drawing closer to her in the deepening of her hurt. When she told him how painful Merlin’s procedure had been and how her body burned from it even now, he went rigid, his face darkening, especially as she relayed how her memory had shattered.
“So, if I seem broken, it might be that my mind stabbed itself in a thousand places. My brain could be actively bleeding for all I know.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke.
“That was an awful thing he did to you.” Lancelot rolled his jaw back and forth and stared at his feet. “Did you tell Arthur?”
Vera barked a cold laugh. “No. Last night, I couldn’t even string a damn sentence together.”
“He’d want to know. You have to tell him, Guinna.”
“Did you not hear me about the ‘betraying everything he stands for’ bit?” she said, her spark of anger reigniting. “And the potion he had to have just to be able to be near me?”
Lancelot had the gall to look exasperated. “Come off it. I don’t believe for a second that he drank that potion. And we all know what Guinevere did is not what you did.” Vera started to protest, and Lancelot raised his voice. “Stop! You have to actually try to talk to him.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I have tried. I do try.”
“No, you don’t. You get weird and quiet. Why don’t you talk to him like this? Why haven’t you told him what an ass he’s been? You’re half a room away from him every night, and you’ve never railed at him like you would at me. What’d you say to him when you found out about that potion, hm? Did you tell him off or just bolt out of there?”
Vera scoffed but said nothing.
“That’s not trying.”
Her jaw hung slack. “I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this.”
“You don’t understand what he’s been through—”
“You’re right! I don’t. That’s the problem. You both know all these secrets about me and my life that I’m not entitled to. Fuck you. You deal with it.”
She got up to leave, stumbling a few steps from the exhaustion of having pushed their run so hard. Vera heard Lancelot scrambling to stand and help her before she whirled on him.
“Don’t,” she said. She was confident he caught all her meanings with the one word. Don’t touch me. Don’t help me. Don’t follow me.
She stormed back to the castle alone.
Losing Vincent’s face was like having him die all over again. The shattering of that memory brought the day he died into sharper focus. It had been the worst day of Vera’s life. And it would remain as such for some time to come.
But this day—the day that had barely begun, the sun coyly waiting to kiss the horizon with her warmth, would bring its own darkness.
Thus began the second worst day of Vera’s life so far.
