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.”

It was only two mornings later that Lancelot led her through the cobbled streets of Camelot straight to the armory. Vera had expected some royal seamstress or a clothing shop. Instead, they were greeted with a sharp glare by the scruffy middle-aged man (who Vera felt unreasonably sure would ride a motorbike if he were born thirteen hundred years later) deftly weaving tiny metal circles into chain mail. He set his work down in front of him and scratched his mostly grey beard with thick fingers as his eyes searched Vera. She felt he could read every lie she was living as if it were written plainly on her face.

“Your Majesty. Lancelot,” he said, more grunt than words. He rose and picked up a neatly folded pile of garments and pressed them into Vera’s hands. Right to the point. She could appreciate that. “Change over there.” He pointed to a makeshift changing curtain in the corner.

After struggling to untie the strings of her dress, Vera pulled on the startlingly comfortable garments. The trousers were rust-brown with loose-fitting legs and buttons just below her knees to keep them from flapping about while she ran. The long-sleeved shirt was more fitted than the tunics she had seen but made of the same soft fabric as the trousers.

“How does it feel?” Vera started at Lancelot’s voice as her fingers fumbled with her new trousers’ buttons.

She stepped out from behind the curtain. “They’re perfect.”