Текст книги "The once and future queen"

Автор книги: Paula Laferty

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

As the haze and stirring sick of the day before waned, Vera felt Merlin’s magic at work. When her thoughts drifted to Arthur, albeit frazzled and nonsensical, she found an unwelcome sense of intimate fondness. This tug toward him had a pleasant aura tinged with the poison of its origin. It felt the way a funeral parlor smelled; overly sweet in an attempt to mask the odor of unstoppable decay.

Vera could begrudgingly acknowledge that Lancelot was right—Arthur had to know. And damn Lancelot. She would rage into Arthur’s part of the chamber and shout him awake from his bed. She would do it.

But he wasn’t there.

Vera looked for him all day, but her hours were far more occupied than usual. It was Christmas Eve. There was plenty to do to ready the castle for the evening’s banquet guests. She thought she’d have time to search for him in earnest once she finished her tasks, but it was straight back to her chamber to get dressed in her green gown and moonstone circlet and then to the great hall without delay.

The hall was friendlier than usual. There was no table atop the dais. Instead, the space was occupied by a band of musicians playing lively background music. Hanging orb lights zigzagged from one side of the vaulted ceiling to the other. Guests milled about on the balcony, sipping from their goblets as they whispered about the growing crowd below.

Under different circumstances, Vera would have loved this, but her cursed fever burned on, as did her focus on finding Arthur.

She saw him across the hall, and her breath caught. He’d replaced his usual and much more casual attire with slim-fitting leather armor, dark like burned charcoal from shoulders to toes except for the cape of deep red clasped at his collarbone, the shine of his sword’s hilt at his waist, and the simple crown of gold on his head. His hair was pulled into a tight knot at the nape of his neck.

He hadn’t dressed this formally since Vera’s arrival, yet it was as natural on him as anything and was very striking. His gaze met Vera’s before he quickly turned away to greet a guest. A sudden flutter had thrummed in her chest. She felt the urge to cup her hand against his cheek. The thought of his skin against hers sent the warmth of desire spreading through her. With a start, she realized the feeling matched what had belonged to the memory that was gone … that her dormant, tucked-away passion for the love she’d lost was now assigned to Arthur.

Something in what happened yesterday had threaded a cord from her destroyed memory of Vincent straight to Arthur. Even after the memory’s disintegration, its emotions remained intact, questing out and latching on to the next face that came along. With the potion and … everything else, Arthur was already the prime target. How could she feel furiously attracted to him and also want to scream wrath in his face and weep for days?

His conversation bore the marks of ending: nods and subtle leaning away from one another. If Vera didn’t move now, she might lose her nerve. She plastered on the most relaxed smile she could muster.

Feigning confidence, Vera came to his side. Had his body stiffened at her arrival, even as his voice remained steady? She decided she’d imagined it and touched his arm. Arthur pulled away from her. No, he violently yanked his arm from her grasp like her touch burned him. Right in front of the nobleman, who was a stranger to Vera—and who absolutely noticed and shifted uncomfortably.

Vera did not try to hold her face pleasantly. She stared at Arthur with open ire. Fuck you fuck you fuck you, she said in her head and hoped he could feel it despite his refusal to look in her direction.

Her cheeks burned as she spotted others nearby whose eyes had widened and were whispering behind their hands. The hush swelled out from her and Arthur, the event’s epicenter. One face in the crowd didn’t match the discomfort of all the rest. She savagely glowered at Lancelot, straight ahead of her. His features churned with guilt. She tipped her shoulders up, her glaring shrug a question and a taunt. See? What would you have me do?

He had the decency to cast his eyes to the floor.

Fine. They could all have the satisfaction of believing Vera was the bane of the kingdom. It wasn’t entirely untrue anyway. She turned without another word, snatched a goblet of wine from a passing server’s tray, and sank into a chair right by the side door where the staff came in and out, as out of the way as she could be. She would not speak to anyone nor try to play the role of the good queen.

Vera saw Merlin from the corner of her eye. She deliberately avoided his gaze, but he was coming right toward her.

She loathed that she trembled at the prospect of talking to him. Lancelot, for his part, clocked Merlin’s intent and cut him off at the pass, diverting him to a group of visitors eager for his attention. Vera was far too angry to acknowledge her gratitude for this kindness.

Arthur was back to greeting guests with his quick smile and easy laugh, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. It pushed Vera near her boiling point, which seemed far more literal than she preferred as she still felt about a million degrees. She slouched in her seat and kept her head down.

“You don’t have to do this.”

Vera jumped. She wasn’t sure how long Matilda had been standing at her shoulder. The ever-lovely woman bent at the waist so her face was near Vera’s ear as she slid a bag onto her lap. Vera’s embroidery supplies. She’d forgotten all about them after the nightmarish afternoon in Merlin’s study.

“Do you want to slip away?” Matilda said. “I’ll cover for you.”

Vera clasped her friend’s hand. “Thank you.” Bless her, the only one among the lot who she didn’t currently want to throttle. “If you see Arthur, tell him I’ve gone to bed.”

Matilda’s eyebrow quirked up.

“I don’t want him to follow me. I mean it.”

Matilda looked like she wanted to argue, but she nodded instead. She scooted in front of the table, giving Vera a discreet escape out the door behind her. A huddle of guests surrounded Merlin, enthralled by whatever stories of magic he told, but neither Arthur nor Lancelot was anywhere to be seen. Good.

The wintry wind in the courtyard was a sharp contrast to the oppressive heat in the great hall. It, and having escaped the banquet, lifted Vera’s spirit some straightaway. She’d made it to the entry hall and was striding from the grand doors to cross the front courtyard to the chapel when her steps faltered at the sound of raised voices echoing from the corridor to her right.

She hesitated near the main doors, hoping to get a clearer idea of if the voices were coming toward her. It didn’t matter, really. She should go on and hurry outside. Whoever it was would never know she’d been there. But she found her feet moving away from the entry and toward the other door, the one to the corridor.

They were distant enough that the sound didn’t have enough shape to form coherent words. Vera crept closer as the voices picked up again, a sense of familiarity lifting goosebumps along her arms. She thought it might be Arthur—and words or no, it was clear from the volume and the clipped cadence of his speaking that he was angry. The door to the corridor was already open enough to slip through, and … yes, there was a nook in the hallway there that she could tuck into and keep unseen, as long as they didn’t pass by her.

Vera weighed the risk, standing on the precipice, but chance decided for her. She saw the shadow halfway down the corridor, the warning alarm that Arthur and whoever was with him were about to come into view. Vera ducked into the nook. While the castle’s main thoroughfares were well-lit, this corridor had only one torch lit over the whole length of it. No one was meant to be here.

Two sets of footsteps were coming Vera’s way, and fast.

“I’m not doing this,” Arthur said sharply.

The footsteps stopped, overtaken by scuffling. It sounded like something slammed against the wall. Vera leaned far enough forward to see and nearly stumbled from her hiding place as she saw that the slam had been Arthur’s back as Lancelot shoved him. Lancelot held him pinned to the wall with his arm braced across Arthur’s chest.

“You don’t get to walk away from me!” Lancelot’s shout ripped through the corridor. Vera would have cowered if he’d ever spoken to her that way. “You’re so goddamn wrong. Do you know how long it took for me to know? One conversation with her the very first night in Glastonbury. That’s it.”

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.

His breath was on her neck in a second. Vera pressed her hands beneath her and bucked her head and shoulders backward at him. He fell into the statue’s pedestal. Vera heard the wobbling of the great stone and the crash that followed, knowing that the beautiful statue had shattered on the floor.

It did little to stop Thomas. Vera tried to scramble to her feet as he caught her ankle and pulled her back to the ground. This time, he flipped her over onto her back, held her shoulders down with his hands, and quieted her writhing legs by straddling her hips.

Every instinct in Vera’s body told her to fight, and she did—like mad. With all the strength in her, she flailed against his hold. She wriggled and writhed; she snapped her teeth at his hands and even managed to free one hand and jab at his eye before he forced it back down. Thomas released both of her shoulders, and Vera thought she might have a chance. She thought he was giving up or coming to his senses, but he wasn’t. He grabbed her head with both hands, picked it up, and slammed it against the floor.

Vera’s eyes were open, but all she saw in front of her were stars. Her ears rang, and she moaned in pain. The seconds that it dazed her and shunted her movements were precious time when she couldn’t afford to be incapacitated. When her vision cleared, she saw a short-bladed knife in Thomas’s hand, not four inches long. He’d stopped straddling her, pulling both legs to one side, and he slashed a slit in Vera’s dress from the waist down, revealing the top of her leg.

This was her opportunity. He wasn’t on top of her. Vera’s mind told her body to move, and her panic only rose as she found it wouldn’t respond, addled from the blow to her head. Thomas was unrecognizable, his face now the contorted likes of a monster unparalleled to any horror Vera had ever seen close up, pupils consuming the entirety of his eyes. He hungrily brought the knife to her thigh, high on her leg on the outside. He relished in pressing it to her skin, so agonizingly slowly. She screamed out as it pierced her flesh, as he exercised such restraint in pushing it in, millimeter by millimeter, devastatingly slow until the hilt kissed her skin. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

Tears streamed down Vera’s face. She didn’t know when she’d begun to beg him to stop, but now all she heard were her own frenzied cries of “Please!” over and over.

He pulled the knife out at the same measured pace he’d shoved it in. Vera barely had time to regain her breath before Thomas raised his thumb and pressed it forcefully to the wound, smearing the blood and raising fresh screams from her. They were endless. Vera ceased being able to distinguish the sounds emerging from her mouth between “please” and “stop” and wordless cries of agony. She’d never felt this sort of pain in all her life.

She found new words when he released his thumb from her thigh, slick with her blood.

“Help! Please, help!” She screamed these loudly, praying that anyone might be passing near enough to hear.

Thomas leaned the weight of his body on top of hers. Vera shuddered, remembering that this man had once reminded her of her father. “I locked the door. No one is anywhere near here. Not tonight.” His mouth was so close to Vera’s ear that she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.

“Why are you doing this?” Vera wailed through her sobs.

He didn’t answer. He dragged the knife’s edge up her bodice and across her breast as if spreading butter over bread, pressing hard enough to pick up bits of green fuzz from her dress as he scraped it to her shoulder, where he stopped, a fresh gleam of malice in his eye. Vera forced herself to face him, allowing all her fear to show, hoping against hope that it would help him see a person and not the temptress he’d conjured in his mind.

“Please, don’t,” she cried. It was the only play Vera had at the moment, and it was the wrong one.

Thomas smirked without mercy. He relished her terror. Again, he tipped the knife’s hilt upward and pressed its point against her skin. He stabbed her shoulder to the hilt with the same tormenting pace as before.

Vera wished she would pass out, that the pain would end, but he seemed to be aiming to puncture her body carefully, causing as much agony as he could without rendering her unconscious. When he pulled the knife free and wiped it clean on her dress, she gathered her energy and surged against him. It was to no avail. He had too much of an advantage of size and position.

Thomas threw his leg back over her. He headbutted her against the stone floor to stop her flailing and screaming. The second blow to her head was enough. She wasn’t entirely conscious anymore. Thomas pressed the knife to her throat with one hand and held both her hands pinned to the ground above her head with the other.

“Don’t thrash about, or I might just slip,” he said with startling calm as he slashed a tiny cut under Vera’s chin as if to show her. She groaned and felt a pool forming beneath the back of her head. Some rational part of her mind wondered if it was blood.

She only half realized in her dazed stupor that he’d shifted, that her hands weren’t pinned to the floor. He’d released them, instead groping down her body, grabbing her breast, and then toying at the top of her thigh. The knife was also gone from her throat. With that hand, he fumbled at the fastenings of his pants. He meant to take every morsel of her being.

Vera whimpered. As the sound left her lips, the last of her resolve to fight slipped away with it. She wasn’t a brilliant strategist queen. She was nobody. And she had failed at the one purpose of her existence. She couldn’t even be a vessel for Guinevere’s memory. What did any of it matter? She went still. Her flood of pleas trickled to silence.

Vera was going to die here.

You are more than a vessel.

She heard the words in her shattered mind as clearly as if someone had said them in her ear. A current, potent and electric, surged from Vera’s core to her fingertips. Her free fingertips. Thomas continued to struggle with his trousers. Where moments ago, she’d been ready to surrender, now her instincts screamed at her to act.

Vera groped wildly around her head, searching for anything she could grab, and her fingers closed on something that easily fit in her palm. Her hair splayed across her face, blocking her view.

Distantly, she heard a shout from the front of the chapel as she swung her arm at Thomas and made contact.

It was all so quick. He wasn’t on top of her anymore. Vera was free. She lifted her head a fraction, and her hair fell away from her eyes. Arthur stood above her, having bodily thrown Thomas off her. Thomas had tumbled backward over the destroyed statue and now clung to the lifeless stone, trying to heft himself back up. Arthur’s sword was drawn, and the last vestige of rage hadn’t yet fallen from his face as he stared at Thomas in shock.

What had been a monster beyond reckoning was now replaced by a terrified man, barely clinging to life. In his attempt to rise, Thomas only made it to his knees. His eyes were clear and filled with fright. He clutched at his throat as blood gushed in horrible voluminous squirts between his fingers.

Vera rolled over onto her knees and pushed herself up, transfixed, as Thomas’s breaths grew shallower, and his eyes bulged while he gurgled. He opened his mouth, and blood dumped from it as freely as if from an upended bucket.

It was perhaps only seconds of this sputtering, gasping, and squelching that felt an eternity. They echoed through the chapel’s pristine acoustics, a chorus that was the song of death. As the stretches of silence between his breath lengthened, the color drained from Thomas’s face before he collapsed, wide-eyed and blood-drenched and completely still on top of the broken statue.

Vera’s eyes flashed to Arthur’s sword, shining and clean, reflecting brilliantly in the dim light. She looked down at what her hand had found in desperation: Thomas’s small knife. The knife he’d wiped clean on her dress that was now freshly bathed in ruby-red blood.