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.