Текст книги "The once and future queen"

Автор книги: Paula Laferty

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

It was still night when Vera first woke. She only partly noticed that The Hobbit was now on the bedside table and the light overhead extinguished, but she didn’t think to wonder how they got that way before she rolled over and was asleep again within seconds. The next time she woke, it was to Matilda’s hand shaking her shoulder, and it was nearly midday.

There was no jolt, no momentary confusion about why she hadn’t woken up in her bed at the George and Pilgrims. She knew where she was. More importantly, she knew when she was. Her eyes flicked to the door next to the desk, now slightly ajar. Curiosity about what lay beyond purred within her.

“Merlin wishes to speak with you,” Matilda said, “and he insisted it can’t wait.”

If Vera had expected Matilda to do anything other than wait attentively, expectantly, she was sorely mistaken.

“You’ll want to help me get ready, won’t you?” Vera said, and Matilda nodded. “I don’t mind doing it myself, I—”

“Your presence is urgently requested, and this will take much longer without my help,” Matilda said. “Your Majesty, I’m not certain what it is you’re afraid I’ll see that’s any different than it was before. It doesn’t matter to me if you have scars or deformities or … multicolored spots on your skin. If I promise not to say a word or ask a question, will you allow me to help you?”

Vera sighed. “Oh, all right.”

True to her word, Matilda didn’t betray any expression of surprise or confusion at Vera’s knickers as she helped her into a burgundy gown with sleeves that opened dramatically at the wrists, making Vera feel like she had delicate wings when she held her arms out. Matilda combed the tangles from her hair and arranged the circlet crown on her head over a tidy plait. She was ready in all of five minutes.

Under the guise of a detour to put The Hobbit back in its place on the desk, Vera pulled the side chamber door open a few inches more and peeked inside. There was no one there, and the room was all but empty save for a neatly made bed with the book Arthur had taken atop the blankets.

Matilda led Vera downstairs and into another courtyard, this one flanked by the tower with Vera’s room and the one with the rounded roof that didn’t match all the rest. Pipes she hadn’t been able to see in the dark came from the top, tracing their way down the sides and running along the castle walls. She followed Matilda through an arched doorway in the tower’s side. The inside couldn’t be more different from the tower with Vera’s quarters. No stairs climbed up, though there was a much narrower stone staircase descending into darkness. On the wall opposite was a ladder from the floor to the high ceiling, clearly visible because this tower was hollow.

Right in the middle of the dirt floor was a brick-walled well with a bucket pulley system. Wooden buckets rose from the well on one side, filled with water that sloshed as they rocked and clanked upward before the ascent stabilized and the buckets steadied. The filled buckets disappeared into one of two holes in the ceiling and reemerged from the other, upended and empty as they lowered down to continue the cycle. Vera gawped at the medieval brilliance before her. This was a water tower.

Merlin’s study was down the staircase at the end of a narrow hallway. Matilda left Vera to enter on her own, and it was something like entering a pristinely ordered kaleidoscope. She wanted to look everywhere at once. One side housed a chemist’s kitchen, with a large sink basin next to a chunky wooden worktable—and within arm’s reach, a cauldron near the fireplace. Lining the back wall were shelves and shelves of glass vials and jars, filled with a rainbow of contents: a cerulean paste, red pellets, flaky green herbs, inky black goo, and hundreds of containers.

She heard water trickling over rocks. The chamber was so expansive that Vera strained to see where the sound came from in the farthest corner. Water flowed from the sculpted mouth of a stone boar’s mouth into a bathing pool below it. In between where she stood and the pool was a veritable excess of treasures. There were baskets of rolled-up scrolls, wooden gears, metal globes, and delicate instruments ordered in cabinets from floor to ceiling, crystals in every color and size imaginable, and at the room’s center, seated behind one of two desks pushed together, Merlin was bent over a book so enormous it nearly covered the entire desktop. He stood as Vera entered.

“You look well-rested,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.

“I am. Thank you,” she said.

He gestured at the seat next to his desk and she obligingly sat down, eyes still combing over the treasures of his study. “You inevitably have questions, and I owe you answers.”

That pulled her attention back. “Yes, only about a hundred.” She hoped she was smiling in a way that didn’t betray her fear.

“Go on, then,” he said encouragingly.

Vera went straight to the one that had bothered her most. “Why didn’t you come to tell me who I was sooner? You can travel through time. That’s the one thing we should have plenty of!”

Merlin chuckled. “The irony of it all is not lost on me. But the magic of time travel is not so simple, and it is limited. There are only certain times when the wormhole is accessible, and even then, the magic stabilizing it is different from the gifts most are born with. It was developed by mage study, and it is finite. Once it’s spent, it is gone, and travel will become impossible.”

If something happened, and she couldn’t get back to her parents—to her father. Vera looked at her hands in her lap and squeezed her fingers into her thighs as a physical shiver of fear seared through her. What if she was stuck here?

“Which is why I didn’t use it more than was necessary,” Merlin added more quietly, his eyes tender with understanding. “I promised I’d give you the option to leave after your work here is done, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep that promise. Now,” he said more brightly, “what else would you like to know?”

Vera groaned. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know anything about magic or this kingdom …”

“All right. Basics,” Merlin said. “When the Romans departed after a long occupation, it left what you know as England as thousands of scattered tribes, vulnerable and enticing to conquerors. That much is likely in your history books. After years of relative chaos, magic intervened and chose Arthur, and he brought the kingdom together.”

“Was it Excalibur?” Vera asked, unable to stop herself from interrupting. “Did he pull a sword from a stone or a lake or … whatever?”

Merlin smiled like he was speaking to a child. “It wasn’t so dramatic as any of that. A mage met him and was able to see him—to really see him and sense that he was chosen.

“Miraculously, all the other mages in the land who met Arthur confirmed it, too. That was a compelling testimony, as it didn’t benefit any of them. But that’s just it. It was undeniable. Anybody with even a less powerful gift could sense it when they met him, and that’s no meager part of the population—nearly one in four. It gave him a firm foundation for ruling.”

“Sorry.” Vera stopped him. “A quarter of people here have magic? Is everyone with magic—or the gift—is that what you call it? Is everyone with magic a mage?”

“No. In fact, nearly all with the gift are born with one ability, and that’s that. Mages are far rarer. We have multiple gifts, and we acquire more throughout our lives. Most towns in the kingdom have a mage who provides powers for their citizens. The greater the castle and surrounding town, the greater the mage. Our largest cities often have two.” He waited, looking at Vera expectantly.

The implication dawned on her. “Are there two here?” she asked.

“There used to be. We shared this study.” He gestured to the other desk. “She betrayed the kingdom by trying to kill the queen and nearly succeeding.” Merlin folded his hands in front of him as Vera realized that, by the queen, he meant her.

“You said what happened was an accident,” she said.

He nodded gravely. “The official story from the throne is that you were in an accident and that Viviane, our second mage, happened to be on a mission in Saxon lands when she was killed by captors. Only Arthur, Lancelot, and now you know the truth; Viviane attacked you, and she died for her crime. But we have kept it from our people.”

That raised hairs on Vera’s arms. “Why?”

“Peace, and even Britain itself, is young. The wars ended three years ago, and here we had an unprecedented force of unity, a land and a people rich with magic, and more mages with greater power than any nation has ever seen. The people are building infrastructure, knowing they’re a part of something different, something bigger than themselves. This time is golden. Have you noticed how few guards there are roaming the castle grounds? That you only have the one chambermaid? That Arthur isn’t constantly accompanied by a king’s guard?”

She had noticed, but she’d thought it merely a coincidence that there’d been no guards in the corridors last night.

“We’re not yet so established as to be confined by the structures and formality demanded by an older and larger country. It’s a special time of growth and prosperity that few nations enjoy, and we only have it this once. Can you imagine how that would have shattered when the king’s own mage, the most trusted and powerful position at court aside from the king himself, betrayed him? We couldn’t sacrifice what we’d built, so we made the difficult decision to keep it all a secret.”

“But you can’t keep it a secret for long, can you?” Vera leaned back in her seat as if this would help her absorb the blow of this information. “You said yesterday that magic was draining from the kingdom. Won’t they begin to notice?”

“Yes, and noticing will be the least of our problems, I’m afraid,” Merlin said, and his face drew taut. “When I said that the magic rate was one in four, it was a misrepresentation of our current situation. It is the number most know and will say offhandedly, and it was true … before. Viviane cursed us. The magical birthrate is closer to one in ten now. This nation was founded on magic, and we will not survive without it. I can only imagine the designs she must have had for the kingdom to lay such a curse.”

Merlin tilted his head to the side. “But you knew. You found her out, and you alone know what she did. She locked up your memories because they are our key to undoing her wrongs. It is a miracle we didn’t lose you in her attack.” He closed the massive book before him and opened his hands palms up toward her. “You’re a one-of-a-kind anomaly, my dear. The type of magic I used to save your life has never been used before.”

“Then how do you know it will work?” she asked, and with a swallow, mustered the nerve to voice her fear. “Merlin, I’m not her. I don’t know how I could possibly have her memories.”

“They’re your memories,” he corrected. “And I know because you’ve already begun to remember.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said adamantly.

“You have.” There was that measured patience in Merlin’s smile. “I saw it.”

Vera stared at him. There wasn’t a single point in the last twenty-four hours when she had been anything but dumbfounded. The closest she had come to a memory was her unnerving affection for Lancelot, something she hoped Merlin hadn’t noticed.

His eyes glinted. “How much horse riding do you recall doing during your life in Glastonbury?”

“Horse riding?” She blinked. “Hardly any.”

“Any formal training?”

She shook her head.

“Guinevere, there’s a particular way a lady wearing a gown is trained to dismount her horse. I watched you do it last night precisely as you were trained as a young lady in our time. You did it as if it was second nature to you because it is.”

As soon as Merlin said it, she realized it was true. At the time, Vera had been consumed with what would come next. She hadn’t noticed getting off the horse at all, and if someone had asked her to recount step-by-step how to do it, she wasn’t sure she could. But Vera felt an easy conviction that she could do it again. “That’s enough for you to feel certain the rest of it’s in there?”

“It is enough, and I am certain,” he said.

“Is there some magical way to make me remember?” Vera heard desperation creeping into her shaking voice. “Can’t you pull it out of my head or something?”

Merlin steepled his fingers in front of his lips. She thought he wanted to say yes, but he sighed and clicked his tongue. “Ultimately, we’ll need to use a magical procedure to penetrate the final barrier—to get to the heart of what Viviane didn’t want you to remember. But …” He took a slow breath before he nodded, resolved. “The more you can wear away at what she’s done to block you, the better magical intervention will ultimately work.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Familiarity is fundamental to unlocking both your conscious and unconscious memories. Immerse yourself into what was your ordinary life as thoroughly as possible. As queen, you’re responsible for all matters in the castle, so you’ll be well-equipped to perform those duties. I didn’t plan it this way, but it works out rather well that you helped run the hotel with Martin and Allison. But the most important thing you can do is reconnect with Arthur—in every way you can.”

She inhaled sharply. Her eyes flashed to Merlin. Did he—was he implying something … physical? She was probably blushing.

Vera cleared her throat. “Why would that help me remember?”

“There was no one you were closer to than the king. That’s why this is so difficult for him.” Merlin smiled sadly. “He scarcely dares to hope he might have you back. His love for you is the core of breaking through to your memories.”

Vera had a hard time believing that the man she met last night, so cold and intimidating, would ever want to have anything to do with her, much less reconnecting. Still, she resolved to try.

At the very least, Vera could throw herself into Guinevere’s life.

Matilda took her to nearly every corner and crevice of the castle grounds throughout the afternoon. They started in the kitchen and caused a stir as Vera pretended to know the cook and the half-dozen kitchen staff members who flooded her with their welcomes. They visited the gardens, went to the stables, and met with the castle staff.

Matilda turned to Vera before each stop. “Would you prefer to lead the conversation, Your Majesty?” she’d ask. Or, “Please chime in as you like.”

Vera smiled politely but observed in silence, knowing she’d betray her ignorance if she opened her mouth to say more than greetings. And each time, Matilda’s offer became more of a formality.

When it was time for dinner, Vera let out a long sigh, assuming that Arthur would be there and that this would be her opportunity to finally speak with him. Her relief was short-lived. The great hall was the largest room in the castle, with two tables that ran the length of it on either side. They were already more than halfway filled with people.

A much shorter table was perpendicular to the rest at the front atop three short steps. There were only six seats at this table, and the two center chairs were more ornate than the rest, throne-like. They were all empty—save for the one next to the smaller throne. Lancelot occupied it. When he saw Vera, his eyes lit up. She nearly stopped in her tracks.

He remembered her. He wasn’t the only one. All the gathered diners’ eyes shifted to Vera as she took her place on the throne next to him.

But they remembered Guinevere. Lancelot remembered her.

“Good evening,” he said with a cordial bow of his head as he passed her a goblet of wine. “Arthur sends his apologies. He will not be here this evening.” Vera thought she heard frustration, even accusation, beneath his words.

So there it was. Arthur was continuing to avoid Vera, and evidently, Lancelot didn’t approve. Her affection for him bubbled. She scanned the room as she took a sip, and her eyes found Merlin, his mouth fixed in a frown as his gaze darted from Vera and Lancelot to the door.

“How was your first day back?” Lancelot asked, pulling her attention to him.

“It was fine,” Vera said, more a habitual response than an answer. He turned his whole body and squared up with her, his eyebrow raised.

“A bit overwhelming,” she said.

Lancelot propped his chin on his hand. “How so?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I do, if you’re inclined to share.” He seemed to mean it, too.

“All right,” Vera said. Maybe it was loneliness that drove her, or maybe the warm tug of kinship with him. Either way, honesty came forth in a hurried whisper. Lancelot leaned closer. “I don’t think I have Guinevere’s memories and all of magic and the kingdom as you know it and likely even the future that I grew up in is going to be doomed. And I spent the afternoon behaving like a daft fool who doesn’t know anything because, as it turns out, I don’t know anything.”

“I see,” he said, matching her volume. “Why are we whispering?”

“I—” She hadn’t done it on purpose. Vera looked out across the hall, finding far too many pairs of eyes staring back at her. She swallowed and told him about how it had been before, how no one could remember her. “I’m not used to being known or even noticed by anyone. And who even are all these people?”

Lancelot let out a long exhale. “Overwhelming is an understatement,” he said gravely before he turned to the room, and his severity dropped away. “And these are all the noble folk in town. Most helped to fund our war efforts, some are successful merchants. And that man who just sat down over there …” He inclined his head toward the recently occupied seats on the other side of Arthur’s empty chair. “Don’t look,” he added a half second after Vera had turned.

“Sorry,” she said, whipping back to face him.

“It’s all right.” He grinned. “My fault. That man,” he went on more quietly, “has brought his daughter in an effort to tempt me to marriage.”

“You aren’t married?” Vera had assumed that people from the Middle Ages married young. She couldn’t exactly place Lancelot’s age, but she was sure he was at least a few years older than her.

“No. I was eighteen when the invasions started, and life became war for the better part of a decade. Ordinary things like getting married were postponed. You and Arthur only got married three years ago,” he added in a way that felt practiced, as if he’d mounted this defense before. “I haven’t gotten around to it. Most of the knights haven’t, for that matter.”

Much more nonchalantly this time, Vera adjusted in her seat as if she were merely repositioning herself while the food was being served instead of what she was actually doing: getting a glimpse of the hopeful lord and his dejected young daughter.

“There are three more planning to come this week,” Lancelot said through gritted teeth that he was somehow able to keep in the shape of a smile. “I am not being modest when I say that I am really not a catch.”

Vera battled the sudden urge to argue that point as she noticed the muscles in his neck tense and his teeth lock together. He hated this.

She leaned toward him seriously. “If one of the others this week catches your fancy, shall I sing the praises of Lancelot the loud and foolish?”

His eyes flashed to her, a surprised smile playing at one side of his lips.

“Or, perhaps,” Vera continued innocently, “I should tell them that, if the lady is lucky, he might bring her along to scare the piss out of some little shits at sword point?”

Lancelot laughed in earnest. “You may have noticed I left that bit out when we met Merlin last night.” He stared down at his cup, turning it in his fingers.

“I did,” Vera said, and before she had time to overthink it, she kept going. “And what about Arthur? Did you tell him?”

Lancelot grimaced. “I, er, hadn’t gotten around to that.”

This time, it was Vera who laughed. “A convenient theme for you, it would seem.”

Eating dinner on what amounted to a stage in front of a hall of courtly attendants, craning their necks for a view of the long-awaited queen, was a much more pleasant affair with Lancelot at her side, distracting her with courtly gossip. Vera didn’t even notice that the hall had begun to empty and even the seats on the other side of Arthur’s empty chair had been vacated by the lord and his daughter by the time Matilda was standing next to her.

“Matilda,” Lancelot said with a twinkle in his eye. “Will you please marry me and save me from the parade of lords desperate to be rid of their daughters?”

She pursed her lips, feigning annoyance, though a sly grin seeped through. “As tempting and romantic an offer as that is—no.”

Lancelot shrugged as he pushed out his chair. “Worth a shot. Good evening, lady Matilda.” He bowed to each in turn and winked at Vera. “G’night, Guinna.”

She pressed her lips together to stifle her smile as he departed. Maybe he’d always called Guinevere Guinna, but the endearment was brand new to Vera.

Matilda watched with her head cocked to the side and her expression unreadable. “Let’s retire, Your Majesty,” she said.

After Vera’s mission of connecting with Arthur had been so thoroughly thwarted, she held out hope of even a short interaction in their chamber like they’d had the previous evening. This time, she was prepared. She’d decided that when she saw him, she’d be blunt as a mallet and tell him that she didn’t believe she was actually Guinevere either. They weren’t—they couldn’t be—the same person. If Arthur knew she had no designs to try to replace the woman he’d lost and that all she wanted was to unearth those memories for the kingdom, for him, surely he would help her.

But when she returned to their chambers, the door to the side room was already locked. The next morning, Arthur was gone before she woke.

Matilda knew everything that happened in the castle, so Vera was positive that she’d noticed the strange situation between what should have been two reunited lovers, but she didn’t let on. She dutifully accompanied Vera in the tasks of running castle life and murmured kind corrections in her ear when she got details wrong, which she frequently did. That too must have sounded some alarm bells that Matilda ignored, save a raised eyebrow here and there.

By far, the highlight of Vera’s first week came on her third morning when she was woken before dawn to a knock at her chamber door. She sat up in bed, thinking she’d imagined the sound in the silence that followed when it happened again. Three sharp knocks. Vera crept from her bed, her bare feet hissing along the cold stone floor, eyeing the locked door to Arthur’s chamber as she considered whether she should call for help.

“Who’s there?” she asked in an awkward half-whisper.

“It’s Lancelot!”

She opened the door right away, worried something was wrong, but there he stood with a broad smile. “Fancy going for a run?” he asked.

“Yes!” Vera said. She left him in the hallway while she dressed.

A quick rummage through the wardrobe produced a tunic shirt, heavier and more blousy than the one Lancelot wore, and a pair of thick brown trousers. Neither was ideal, but Vera was so desperate for the release of a run that she’d have gone in her nightgown if it was all she had.

They left through a back gate in the castle wall, an ordinary and underwhelming wooden door (that didn’t at all match up with the rest of the main gate’s defensive measures), and set out.

The sun had not yet risen, and the trail they ran on was dark, but Lancelot’s orb bobbed along between them. Their pace was easy and left air in their lungs for conversation, which came rather effortlessly.

Vera nearly ran Lancelot off the trail in panic when a squirrel burst out of the bushes near them, prompting him to yell out an overly loud warning for any animal he saw after that. “Bird!” he’d shout and point, even if it was high in the sky. But his dedication to the joke served him poorly when he was mid-point and stumbled on a root that stuck up in the path, only barely avoiding a face-first wipeout.

Vera grinned to herself in the darkness, patiently waiting for her moment as they ran on. Then she saw it lying in the path ahead.

“Stick!” she shouted when they came upon it, a puny thing no bigger than her arm. Lancelot jumped at her voice and then had to full-on stop to recover from his laughter.

She’d started hundreds of mornings running. This was like every one of those runs, except this time, she wasn’t alone. Vera was so grateful she didn’t even think to complain about how heavy her clothes were and how quickly she was drenched from head to foot in sweat.

After about an hour, Lancelot guided them to the back gate where they’d started as the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. He flopped down on the grass outside the wall and held out his hand as his orb zoomed back to him and shrunk in his palm.

“Is that your magic?” Vera asked, nodding toward his light as she sat down next to him.

“What? Oh, this?” He spun it in his fingers before pocketing it. “No. No, I don’t have a scrap of magic. Merlin provides all the lights … well, most magic for Camelot, truth be told.”

“And what about Arthur? Does he have magic?” Vera asked, making a great effort to sound casual.

“That,” Lancelot said emphatically, “is a much more interesting question altogether. Not explicitly. But when the invasions began, and Arthur started uniting the people … I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there. So many things had to come together just right for us to stand a fighting chance. And we’d have been thoroughly fucked without the mages, but,” his eyes clouded with admiration, “I don’t say this because he’s like my brother, but this country and this peace—none of it would exist without Arthur.”

“He sounds remarkable,” Vera said, feeling like something leaden had dropped into her stomach.

Lancelot smiled sympathetically at her. She could read in his face that he knew far more than he was willing to share.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, more bluntly than she meant to.

“Ah,” Lancelot leaned toward Vera so that his shoulder pressed lightly against hers. “It’s … not my story to tell.”

Fiercely loyal. Vera heard Merlin’s words in her mind as Lancelot shook his head and picked at the grass near his feet. “You should talk to him, though,” he told her.

She scoffed. “He’d have to be willing to be in the same room with me first for that to happen.”

He set his jaw and an unspoken exchange passed between them as their eyes met. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but Vera felt like, at least in this matter, he was on her side. He reached up to pat her back but quickly pulled his hand away. “Gross. Gods, you are dripping in sweat, aren’t you?”

Vera laughed as the wave of tension broke between them. “This shirt is so damn heavy.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Then let’s get you better clothes.”