Текст книги "The once and future queen"

Автор книги: Paula Laferty

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Vera felt Lancelot’s presence at her elbow. He had a tankard in each hand with a steaming hand pie balanced on top and watched her with shrewd interest. She hurried to relieve one of his hands, taking a pie and a tankard, and followed when he maneuvered toward one of many long, shared tables with benches on either side.

Vera had only just sat down before she took as large of a bite as could be deemed polite and shook her head as she chewed. The insides were so scorching hot that Vera had to indelicately hold it in her mouth and suck air in through her teeth.

“What were you looking at back there?” Lancelot asked.

She could barely taste the pie filling beneath the blazing heat but would swear for the rest of her life that it was delicious. Once she managed to swallow, she answered. “It’s so different from how it all ends up in my time. You only find magic in stories, and—I mean, this is our history. I learned about this time period in school, and we got it so wrong. What the bloody hell happened between now and then?”

“Nobody knows,” Lancelot said, suppressing a grin with a sip of his ale. Vera only vaguely registered that it was likely in response to her colorful language. She was more focused on what he’d said. She hadn’t expected him to have an answer. “Merlin can’t access the time between now and nineteen hundred.”

“How do you know that?” Vera asked.

“I’m very smart, and I know a lot of things,” said Lancelot after swallowing a sizable mouthful. “The magic is limited.”

“Really?”

“Yes, so many things.” He leaned forward, eyeing Vera with a mock intensity. “Ask me anything.”

She laughed, which drew a pleased smile from her companion. “No, I meant—”

“I understood what you meant. There’s a full block on the next thirteen hundred years that magic can’t penetrate. There’s no knowledge beyond that,” he said as if that was the end of it.

“Oh.” Vera fell silent as she finished her pie and sipped her ale, trying to organize what she’d learned and what she still needed to ask. It was no small feat. It felt the more she was told, the less she knew. She was holding onto her tankard tightly, her body tense with the effort to stave off panic. Deep breath. Set it all aside. You’re fine.

She didn’t have to work at it long as her eyes snagged on one man, markedly out of place in the midst of celebration as he scrambled through the crowd, his brow slick with sweat and his sights set squarely on Lancelot. Vera’s fear deflated with the distraction as she listed her head to the side. Lancelot followed her gaze as the man reached them, dropping both hands onto the table to steady himself.

“Sir Lancelot!” he said between heaving breaths. “I heard you were here. Bloody fine timing, too.” He hastily shifted his focus to Vera, and she reeled with the unfamiliar sensation of being noticeable. “I’m so glad you’re well and returned, Your Majesty. And please, pardon my intrusion. The matter is most pressing.”

“Is it the thieves?” Lancelot asked. The atmosphere around him shifted before Vera’s eyes. His features somehow sharpened and the twinkle of his friendliness hardened in an instant. The Lancelot across from Vera now was rather fearsome.

“They’ve been spotted approaching from the eastern road. I’ll call for soldiers, shall I?” The man straightened, evidently eager to take action. “High time these boys were tossed in the stocks.”

Lancelot sighed, seeming oddly reluctant, but he gave a nod, and the man turned to go. Then Lancelot’s eyes lit, and he caught the retreating man by his arm. “Wait. Have they harmed anyone?”

“The thieves? No,” the man answered quickly. “Nothing more than scrapes and bruises, thankfully.”

“Hm.” Lancelot drummed his fingers on the table. His eyes flicked briefly to Vera. “Garth, could you give the queen and me a moment?”

Garth, tense with his urgency, huffed a breath and pursed his lips.

“I know. Time is of the essence.” Lancelot held up a single finger. “One moment.”

He leaned toward Vera across the table as Garth took a few reluctant steps away.

“These thieves … they’re boys. Barely more than children,” he said quickly. “Little shits, no doubt about it. They’ve been ambushing travelers on the King’s Road for three weeks—and successfully evading the local soldiers, which says something about the boys’ cleverness.”

“Or about the soldiers’ competence,” Vera quipped.

Lancelot grinned down at his hands. “Fair point. In any case, we didn’t unite the whole damn nation and fight off invaders for ten years for those boys to make the King’s Road unsafe. Word is that they don’t have homes. They’ve clearly fallen through the cracks, but we can’t allow their actions to continue. One of two things will happen; they choose to rob the wrong person and get themselves killed or … little shits grow up to become big shits. And big shits make for a mess that can’t be cleaned up, if you’ll pardon my language.”

“No pardon needed,” Vera said. “It’s quite illustrative.”

Garth cleared his throat and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“I think I can scare the piss out of them and set them straight on our way out of town. If you’re all right with it, that is,” Lancelot said. “And if all goes to plan, they’ll have a better life tomorrow than they had today. You won’t have to do anything, and we’ll keep you out of view. You won’t be directly in harm’s way.”

Vera feigned disbelief as she raised an eyebrow, but a startling thrum of excitement quivered through her stomach. “Not directly?”

Lancelot’s half-smirk nearly undid her façade. Shit. He was adorable—and too damn likeable. But it was the next that had her reeling. The smile dropped and he looked at her with ardent sincerity. “I will keep you safe, Your Majesty.” He sounded far more somber than he ought to.

And she believed him.

After Lancelot peppered Garth with a rapid-fire onslaught of quesions, Lancelot picked up his pace to lead Vera to the stables. He kept casting sidelong glances at her as he tempered his strides to her far shorter legs.

“We could run,” she offered before she had time to second guess herself.

His eyes went wide. “Really?”

Rather than answering, Vera started jogging. She heard his laugh before he joined in and drew even with her. Now it was Vera casting glances in his direction, satisfied that he looked delightedly dumbstruck when they got to the horses.

“Guinevere, this is Calimorfis,” he said, brushing the neck of a sweet-natured brown-and-grey spotted mare. “Calimorfis, I’m sure you remember Guinevere.” For the briefest of moments, Vera wasn’t sure if Lancelot was being playful or if the horse might answer back. Talking animals didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility here. But Calimorfis responded with only conventional horse noises, and Vera found that she liked Lancelot a little bit more.

He moved with impressive efficiency: digging through his saddle bag, procuring a traveling cloak for Vera to pull over her dress, helping her onto her horse, and gracefully climbing onto his saddle, all within about a minute.

As they rode away from town, Lancelot explained the plan. The boys’ tactics had been the same each time they attacked. They waited outside town, and when their target approached, one pretended to be alone and injured. As the traveler helped the young boy, the other two came from behind and stole all they could. By the time the target realized what was happening, the thieving boys had made a run for it, and the one feigning injury would scurry off, too.

Lancelot’s plan was a hearty dose of their own medicine. He would pretend to be in distress on the road, where he hoped they’d take the bait of an unexpected easy job. He’d catch them in the act of their thievery and, as Lancelot said, “scare the piss out of them.”

Vera was to remain hidden with her hood up the whole time. He strapped his sword to her horse, committing fully to the bit of appearing unarmed and vulnerable. It was a decision that seemed risky to her as it, in fact, didn’t merely create an appearance of vulnerability but a reality of it.

When Vera questioned him, he held his sword balanced on his palm, considering her query, and then assuredly holstered it behind her saddle.

“I think I’ll manage,” he said.

Merlin’s description of Lancelot echoed in her mind, and it now rang as a warning: loud and foolish. But then there was her instant fondness for him that led to something Vera knew was more dangerous: she already trusted him.

The road from Glastonbury was a downhill stretch until it flattened out in all directions before them. Ahead, the only solid ground was a strip of road that cut through the countryside. Sparse groves of trees hugged close at the road’s edges. But the surrounding terrain wasn’t green. Beyond the hard-packed dirt road, stretching as far as she could see, the last light of day shimmered across the earth like a mirage in the desert, an illusion of water. In truth, it was no mirage at all. They were surrounded by marshland, the shallow water creating an expansive lake. She knew Glastonbury had long ago been an island and found herself staring at that reality.

“That looks good.” Lancelot nodded toward an especially thick clump of trees and brush growth down the road. Vera guided her horse into the grove. She had only ridden a horse twice at summer camp but could tell this was an exceptionally well-trained animal. What Vera lacked in skill, the horse made up for in intuition. She seemed to know exactly where Vera wanted her to go, and once they’d gotten positioned behind the heaviest growth, Lancelot confirmed they were well enough hidden.

And then, they waited.

Vera leaned to her side to watch Lancelot through a gap in the branches. She wasn’t supposed to be seen, but that didn’t mean she wanted to miss the action. He dismounted his horse on the road and stood face-to-face with it, stroking affectionately between its eyes while crooning words she couldn’t hear. There was a faint sound of raucous laughter on the wind. Lancelot stopped, looking over his shoulder. Then, he unceremoniously flung his sizable, graceful body down into the dirt. Vera had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing out loud. He turned his head in her direction with his own silent laugh.

“Keep it together,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. “Stay in it, Guinevere.”

It was jarring to hear him say it. She’d admonished herself with that exact phrase earlier in the evening. Vera craned her neck to see the road as indistinct shapes grew nearer and took the form of three boys.

One was rather enormous. He lumbered along, moving more like a toddler than a man, with hands and feet bigger than his body knew what to do with. He was twice as wide as the littlest. They were a comical match-up, the one hovering around six feet tall, the other a full foot and a half shorter. The littlest one had mousey features and hair the color and texture of dirty straw. The third bore an angry expression on his acne-covered face, but he had the same nose as the mousey boy, and Vera suspected they were brothers. All were filthy and wearing clothes that desperately needed washing or even to be thrown away. Their shirts and trousers were more patch than garments. None wore shoes. Vera felt a pang of sadness.

They were so thoroughly engulfed in their boisterous bantering that they were nearly even with Vera’s grove of trees when the tiny one cried out.

“Look!” His whisper was far too loud to keep any secret. They stopped, and their faces grew hungry.

“He looks hurt,” the enormous boy’s deep voice said, eyebrows knitted together.

“He looks rich.” The smallest one plucked a dagger from his belt and spun it skillfully between his fingers. “And that horse could be sold for a fortune.”

They stood in the road and debated about what to do. The boy with acne and his little brother wanted to check the injured man for money and take the horse. The big one argued they were being greedy and should take the horse and not chance anything else. They hadn’t reached a conclusion when the mousey boy turned without warning and started toward Lancelot.

“Dunstan!” his brother hissed, his voice cracking. “Stop!”

But Dunstan did not stop. He marched forward, dagger poised to strike in front of him as the other boys stayed rooted on the spot. He kicked Lancelot hard in the side, and any sympathy Vera felt drained away in an instant. Lancelot didn’t so much as flinch. She couldn’t imagine how. Her heart hammered furiously.

Lancelot had two pouches at his waist and, satisfied that his prey wasn’t conscious, the boy started fussing with the closure on one. When Lancelot’s hand snapped up to grab his wrist, Vera jumped nearly as much as the boy did.

In one fluid motion, Lancelot was sitting up and eye-to-eye with the shocked child. Dunstan clumsily swung his dagger in retaliation. In the blink of an eye, the dagger was in Lancelot’s hand, and their positions were swapped; Dunstan was now on the ground with Lancelot kneeling over him. His movements were so precise that figuring out how Lancelot managed it was as fruitless as trying to describe a hummingbird’s wings mid-flight. Vera’s question of whether he should face the situation unarmed now seemed asinine.

To their credit, the other boys hadn’t turned tail and run yet. In fact, Dunstan’s brother was charging forward, drawing his own dagger. Lancelot didn’t even turn around entirely as he thrust his hand out and caught the boy about the wrist. He stood to his full height, twisting the elder brother’s arm until his dagger dropped to the ground.

“Oh shit,” Dunstan’s brother moaned, a flash of recognition lighting his pimply face.

Lancelot cocked his head and smiled ruefully. “Well said.” He looked over his shoulder at the largest of the three. “If you want to have any chance of keeping your hands, get over here now.” His voice was so commanding Vera almost wanted to hop off her horse and obey, too.

The large boy reluctantly trudged forward. Lancelot stowed the brothers’ daggers in his belt. They’d all shifted enough that Vera couldn’t see, so she edged her horse closer to the road. She wasn’t as hidden but had a much better view. It was nearly dark, and the boys were facing away from her now anyway. As Lancelot turned back to Dunstan, the largest boy stopped halfway between Vera and Lancelot. He bounced on his toes, hanging in the balance of forward and backward movement. Lancelot’s eyes shot up, sensing that something had gone amiss. The boy was about to do something stupid.

He turned and took off at a lumbering sprint down the road toward Vera. She didn’t pause to consider the potential consequences. Vera kicked her horse into a run, urging her out into the road, where she drew up the reins and stopped so hard that her hood fell back. She unsheathed Lancelot’s sword with both hands, wheeled it in a high arc over her head, and brought it down in front of the boy, halting his path forward. He skidded to a stop and fell back on his bottom, staring up at her in unbridled shock.

“I would reconsider,” she said.

The boy mouthed wordlessly, scrambling backward like a scuttling crab.

“Is that the queen?” the boy with acne asked in horrified awe.

Lancelot gazed at Vera with one corner of his lips quirked up. “Yes, it is.”

Vera thought she heard astonishment in his voice but decided she might have been mistaken as Lancelot shifted to glare at the largest boy. He lumbered back and joined the others.

“Sit.” Lancelot spat the word.

Unsurprisingly, they all did so. None of them dared move. They likely hadn’t even dared blink.

“I don’t know what your lives are like,” Lancelot began after an uncomfortably long stretch of glaring at them in silence, “but the mess you have created on this road has not gone unnoticed by your king. It will not continue.” He paced in front of them, pointedly meeting each of their eyes. “You have a choice. Show up tomorrow at the armory, swear your allegiance to your king, and join his forces. You will have a place to live and food to eat, and you will learn to become good men rather than thieving boys. Or, if you don’t show up, you will be found by the king’s guard itself, and you will not be treated with the leniency I offer today. Do I make myself clear?”

They all nodded vigorously, like anxious chickens pecking for worms.

“Good,” Lancelot said. “Now go—before I change my mind.”

The boys scrambled to their feet and took off back toward Glastonbury at a run. They gaped at Vera slack-jawed as they passed her, except for the large boy, who stared at the dirt. Soon, they were formless lumps fading in the distance.

Vera turned back to Lancelot. His stern expression remained, but it fell away when he met Vera’s eyes.

“Yes!” he shouted, thrusting both fists in the air. “You,” he said, pointing at her, “you were fucking brilliant.”

She was so caught off guard that she laughed. “It was a stupid thing to do,” Vera said, “and this sword is insanely heavy. I about dislocated my shoulder.” She held the sword out to him, both arms straining with the effort.

He accepted it, and where she’d had trouble wielding it with two hands, he easily sheathed it with one and mounted his horse as smoothly as if he were putting on a jacket.

“You were brilliant,” Lancelot repeated. He clicked his tongue, and their horses obediently began to plod along. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You always had a good tactical mind.”

“Tactical mind?” Vera stared at him.

He nodded. “You and Arthur were married mere months before the final invasion. You came up with a crucial part of our battle strategy.”

“I—I did that? You’re certain?”

He laughed though he eyed her appraisingly. “Very certain. You wouldn’t call yourself strategic now?”

“Hell no.” That was the last way she would describe herself.

Half a grin took Lancelot’s face, and he eyed Vera appraisingly for a moment. “You’re different than—” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “You’re different.”

She squirmed in her saddle. “In a good way or a bad way?”

“Just … different,” he said, though he looked hopeful. “S’pose that’s only fair, though. What’s been a year for us has been a whole bloody life for you. What’s it like? In your other time, I mean.”

She wasn’t sure how to answer that. How could she explain the phone she’d forgotten not to reach for about twenty times in the last hour? Where could she even start in describing the future? “I help my parents run an inn,” she said.

Lancelot had loads of questions about how Vera occupied her time. She fumbled through a laundry list of interests, but when she mentioned running, he sat up straighter in his saddle.

“You run?” he said.

“Yes.” Vera bit her lip. Was that an extraordinarily odd thing to say?

He fixed her with a delighted smile. “I shouldn’t be surprised after that bit back near the stables. You looked comfortable running.”

She hadn’t thought about it, but Lancelot had seemed at ease, too. His stride and posture … Vera gaped at him. “Do you run? I didn’t think people ran in this time.”

“Soldiers do,” he explained. “We were at war for the better part of a decade and ran every day to stay battle ready. Most soldiers have scattered to their corners of the country and lead much slower lives—and well deserved, I might add. I train the local forces and the king’s guard, and I still run to keep fit. And I like it.” He shrugged. “It calms my mind.”

“Yes!” Vera nearly shouted it. “That’s exactly it. Actually …” She remembered her trainers stowed in the saddle bag behind her and made a quick decision to show him. He positively gushed, twirling the teal laces between his fingers, and his eyes widened as he felt the cushion on the inner sole.

“Guinevere,” his voice was hushed and reverent, “this has got to be the greatest invention of all time.”

She laughed. “It’s pretty high on the list.”

There was hardly a breath’s space of silence after that. Dark had fallen in earnest, and the velvety black night was bespattered with stars before it dawned on Vera that this was the easiest it had ever been to talk to someone other than her parents. This budding friendship was a pleasant surprise, but the more Vera warmed to Lancelot, the more her stomach churned. He watched her with a knowing look, his eyes kind.

“You thought I was Arthur when we first met, didn’t you?”

She hoped the darkness could cover the heat that rose in her cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “Why didn’t he come?”

Lancelot searched Vera’s face. “I’m sorry. This must be impossibly difficult for you.”

Vera refused to fill the silence. He hadn’t answered her question.

“I don’t want to mislead you. We didn’t know today was going to be the day that Merlin brought you back. He only sent word by messenger this afternoon, and Arthur had reservations about Merlin trying to …” Lancelot paused, his mouth in a tight line. “Well, about Merlin taking such extreme measures to bring you back.”

He seemed to choose his words so deliberately. Vera might as well come right out and ask the direct question. “Does Arthur hate Guinevere?”

“No.” This Lancelot said with certainty. “It’s been … a difficult time.” He shot Vera a heavy glance. “It’s nothing to what you’ve been through, though.”

She tensed, and the memory of Vincent bloody and dying flashed in her mind. How could he know that?

But he saw her reaction and clarified, his tone gentler. “You left your whole life.”

“Oh.” Of course. Funny she hadn’t considered that, but it was true. And her ability to go home, to get her life back, to get herself back was contingent upon a task far more complicated than Vera had naively imagined. “What if I can’t do what Merlin needs?”

Lancelot eyed her for a moment. “Merlin is single-minded in his commitment to the kingdom—to a fault, frankly. I’m not sure his expectations for you are reasonable.”

Vera scoffed. “And I’m not sure he’d trust your assessment of the situation.”

“Ah.” Lancelot flashed a crooked smile, reigniting his spark of levity. “You’ve already noticed that I’m not exactly Merlin’s favorite.”

“You’re about the only thing that broke his—” Vera searched for the right words to describe Merlin’s powerful calm.

“Stick-up-the-ass demeanor?” Lancelot offered. Vera laughed. “Go on, then. What did he say about me?”

“He said that you were Arthur’s dearest friend. And that you’re very loyal,” Vera said.

“Oh, that’s quite nice. And?”

“And … that you’re loud and foolish.”

“That’s—hmm.” At first, she thought Lancelot was indignant, but he was grinning. “He’s really coming around to me. Loud and foolish. That’s probably the nicest way he’s ever described me. Granted, he might have been edging it a bit trying to, you know, convince you to leave everything behind … but I’m calling this progress in the Merlin-Lancelot relationship.”

They’d been riding for nearly two hours before an amicable silence fell, with Vera’s eyelids close behind. They may as well have weighed a hundred pounds for the difficulty of keeping them open.

She woke with a start to a firm grip on her arm, holding her upright.

“About tumbled off there,” Lancelot said quietly. “You’ve had a thousand-year day. Go on and lie forward on your horse’s neck.”

Vera’s eyes were barely open. She nodded mutely and lay forward while Lancelot kept a steadying hand on her back.

She thought she heard him say “I’ve got you,” but it may have been a dream, for she was already asleep.

“Ishau mar domibaru.”

For a second time, unknown words reverberated through Vera’s body, words that she would have no memory of when she woke.