“Arthur,” she said.

When he looked at her, his face was a stone mask of displeasure.

“I—can I drink this water safely?” She hated that her voice shook as she spoke to him. “And I don’t know how to turn off or, um, put out the light. I couldn’t ask Matilda because I should already know …” Her words petered to silence.

Arthur’s expression slipped for a fraction of a second. Vera was nearly certain that something other than blank anger, something softer, rippled through the muscles of his face. He nodded curtly.

“The water is safe. And the light …” He crossed by her to the side of the bed with Vera’s wardrobe and gestured to a marble-like tile on the wall beside the bed. “Hold your hand here until it’s as dark as you like.”

He kept his cold eyes on her only long enough for Vera to mutter, “Thank you.”

Arthur gave another swift nod and stared at the floor as he strode back to the door by the desk, and without another word, he left. She heard the scrape of metal on wood as he locked it behind him.

Vera was certain by Arthur’s response to her and by Lancelot’s carefully couched words that there was far more to Guinevere’s story than Merlin had let on. The looming task of unearthing her memories seemed an impossibility. She’d been naïve to think she was up to the task. An acrid taste rose in Vera’s mouth. She was afraid and felt utterly alone.

Vera downed the cup of water, refilled it, and brought it to the bedside table. She pressed her hand to the marble tile and watched the light fade to black and back up to daylight bright, settling on a dim glow as the darkness of having it completely off unsettled her. She crawled under the heavy covers, lay on her side with her knees curled up by her chest, and, not knowing what else to do, began reading The Hobbit. Vera didn’t notice that, as she read the dialogue, she imagined the voices her father used to perform for all the characters during their Christmas readings. His voices had always delighted her.

And so it was that on Vera’s loneliest night she slipped off to sleep, her hand limp on the open book, with the voice of someone who loved her drifting through her mind.

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.”