“She’s your chambermaid,” Merlin said. “You see? The memories have always been within you. It might take some time, but when you’re back home, we’ll be able to begin unlocking them.”

It was jarring to hear somewhere else, sometime else, referred to as home. This was home. Vera was not a queen. She wasn’t—she couldn’t be—Guinevere. But she couldn’t deny that they were made from the same (what was the word Merlin used?) essence, nor could she deny her own childhood memories. Perhaps she was some sort of … container for Guinevere’s story.

Accepting that brought the possibility of actually leaving into sharp relief. It frightened her. “If I go back with you, will I be stuck there forever?”

Merlin frowned, and there was pity in it. “If you can remember and get the course of history back on track by late spring, we will have another chance for you to return. If returning to this time is what you want.”

“But I can come back?” Vera asked, with a glance at her mother. Allison seemed to be working to keep her face impassive. “It wouldn’t rip the fabric of time or whatever?”

Merlin took a careful sip of his whiskey. “After you’ve helped us set things right, I can bring you back—if that’s what you want.”

Vera clenched her teeth together to keep from grimacing. He kept saying that: “If you want.” Of course she would want to. But as much as the timing was important for Merlin and Arthur, it was for Vera, too.

“Will that bring me back to right now, or will six months have passed here, too?” Vera asked.

Allison gave a sad hum as she reached over and squeezed Vera’s shoulder. “My love, you cannot map your life around his treatment.”

Vera yanked away from her. “Can you guarantee he will survive six months?”

“The treatments are going well—”

“We won’t even know if they’ve worked for another month.” She glared at her mother to stifle her rising tears.

“Ah …” Merlin said quietly. “I gather Martin is ill?”

Vera rubbed at the side of her glass. She’d rather chuck it at the wall. “Yes. Fucking cancer.”

As soon as she said it out loud, she froze. What was she thinking? This man had saved Guinevere from death. “Could you heal him?” Vera asked. “Show me that magic, and I’ll do whatever the hell you want.”

He smiled sadly, and her hope turned to ash. “Cancer differs from mortal flesh wounds. I’m sorry.”

It was back to the essential question, then. “How long would I be gone?”

“You cannot touch any time that you’ve already lived, so I couldn’t bring you into your past here, but I can deliver you back to Glastonbury after the moment we depart this evening,” Merlin said. “I do not wish to mislead you; there is risk. I can’t bring you back unless you’ve—until you’ve helped us fix what’s broken. That is imperative. Whether or not you decide to come with me is your choice.”

“And if I choose not to come, what happens?” Vera asked.

He heaved a sigh and stared down at the table before he met her gaze. “Time is,” he clicked his tongue as he searched for the words, “immeasurably complicated. But the present as you know it is contingent upon you, upon your life and your actions … upon your returning to where you came from. If you stay here, the kingdom will fall. And I can’t say how soon or the way it will happen, but this time, this life as you know it will eventually cease to be.”

“You call that a choice?” Vera gaped at him. “Fuck. I have a life here. I’m—” She gestured around at the pub. What was she going to say? Cleaning toilets and changing bedsheets? “I’m happy.”

“I’m sorry,” Merlin said. “If it weren’t for this, death was the alternative. You would have died the day you were injured and lived none of this life. This was the best I could give you.”

Allison had managed to stave off a steady stream of tears, but her eyes were rimmed in red from the fight. “I have to go, don’t I?” Vera said. Part of her hoped Allison would so staunchly object that the choice would be made for her.

“You do, my love,” she said as she took Vera’s hand in both of hers. “I love you to the end of the world.” Allison tried to continue, but her voice faltered. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Listen to me. You are not happy. And this is not a life. I want better for you.”

It stung, but it was true enough. She hadn’t been happy since Vincent died. She hadn’t quite been able to slip back into herself, and Martin and Allison had seen that. In that way, Merlin’s timing was a gift. Vera couldn’t escape her memories of Vincent anywhere here, though she’d tried. She’d fled from Bristol, where they’d met, where they’d fallen in love, where they’d lived together, and where he died … back to Glastonbury.

She fled up the Tor nearly every morning. She fled into the regularity of cleaning rooms and serving breakfasts. No matter the distance or distraction, pain caught up and claimed her. She was typically good at tucking away hard things, shoving them beneath the place her conscious thought and feeling would reach, but this … this wouldn’t go away.

It all only compounded with Martin’s diagnosis just months ago. Vera had taken on the weight of his treatment schedule in a way she knew wasn’t healthy. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of his healing as her responsibility.

And she knew why. When it came to Vincent, she couldn’t escape the truth of her culpability. When his car skidded off the road and careened into a tree as he came home from the pub quiz, she had been asleep on the sofa. He’d bled in a ditch for nearly two hours before someone found him. It was too late by then. Vera usually went to the weekly pub quiz with him but had stayed home that night because she was tired. If she’d been there, she could have gotten help. Even if she hadn’t dozed off on the damn couch, she’d have realized he never got home. She’d have phoned the police. He wouldn’t have died.

Vera got to the hospital before they lost him. It haunted her that she hadn’t forced her way through the emergency department to get to him. She let him die surrounded by strangers.

And now, she was helpless as her father wasted away, day by day, with nothing she could do but watch.

Fourteen hundred years was a long way to run from her guilt. But they needed Guinevere’s memories, and evidently, Vera had them. Maybe … maybe if she could fulfill this purpose, maybe if she could be the vessel that they needed, maybe—what? It wouldn’t bring Vincent back.

But maybe you could forgive yourself.

How many lives would Guinevere’s locked-up knowledge save? Surely, surely that deed could absolve her, and she could go back to her unnoticeable life. Her father’s treatments would work (they had to work), and loss like Vincent’s wouldn’t be at stake. She could climb the Tor or read a book or stare at the stars and feel cheerful without being shredded by pain.

Vera laughed a little madly. She never dreamed she’d yearn to clean sheets for the rest of her life, but there was a simple joy to be found there. And if she had to travel fourteen hundred years and unearth some lost important woman’s memories to reclaim it—so be it.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Allison shifted in her seat and spoke up sheepishly. “I hate to think of this, but what should we do when people notice she’s gone?”

“They won’t notice. It’s been part of the spell—part of what made it possible for Vera to be here for so long,” Merlin said. “Have you ever noticed the way people interact with her?”

Allison caught Vera’s eye as she nodded. They’d only had conversations about it when she was little—and never since. She had cried about not having friends and her mum soothed her, stroking her hair, telling her it was normal to feel uncertain and insecure.