She found new words when he released his thumb from her thigh, slick with her blood.

“Help! Please, help!” She screamed these loudly, praying that anyone might be passing near enough to hear.

Thomas leaned the weight of his body on top of hers. Vera shuddered, remembering that this man had once reminded her of her father. “I locked the door. No one is anywhere near here. Not tonight.” His mouth was so close to Vera’s ear that she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.

“Why are you doing this?” Vera wailed through her sobs.

He didn’t answer. He dragged the knife’s edge up her bodice and across her breast as if spreading butter over bread, pressing hard enough to pick up bits of green fuzz from her dress as he scraped it to her shoulder, where he stopped, a fresh gleam of malice in his eye. Vera forced herself to face him, allowing all her fear to show, hoping against hope that it would help him see a person and not the temptress he’d conjured in his mind.

“Please, don’t,” she cried. It was the only play Vera had at the moment, and it was the wrong one.

Thomas smirked without mercy. He relished her terror. Again, he tipped the knife’s hilt upward and pressed its point against her skin. He stabbed her shoulder to the hilt with the same tormenting pace as before.

Vera wished she would pass out, that the pain would end, but he seemed to be aiming to puncture her body carefully, causing as much agony as he could without rendering her unconscious. When he pulled the knife free and wiped it clean on her dress, she gathered her energy and surged against him. It was to no avail. He had too much of an advantage of size and position.

Thomas threw his leg back over her. He headbutted her against the stone floor to stop her flailing and screaming. The second blow to her head was enough. She wasn’t entirely conscious anymore. Thomas pressed the knife to her throat with one hand and held both her hands pinned to the ground above her head with the other.

“Don’t thrash about, or I might just slip,” he said with startling calm as he slashed a tiny cut under Vera’s chin as if to show her. She groaned and felt a pool forming beneath the back of her head. Some rational part of her mind wondered if it was blood.

She only half realized in her dazed stupor that he’d shifted, that her hands weren’t pinned to the floor. He’d released them, instead groping down her body, grabbing her breast, and then toying at the top of her thigh. The knife was also gone from her throat. With that hand, he fumbled at the fastenings of his pants. He meant to take every morsel of her being.

Vera whimpered. As the sound left her lips, the last of her resolve to fight slipped away with it. She wasn’t a brilliant strategist queen. She was nobody. And she had failed at the one purpose of her existence. She couldn’t even be a vessel for Guinevere’s memory. What did any of it matter? She went still. Her flood of pleas trickled to silence.

Vera was going to die here.

You are more than a vessel.

She heard the words in her shattered mind as clearly as if someone had said them in her ear. A current, potent and electric, surged from Vera’s core to her fingertips. Her free fingertips. Thomas continued to struggle with his trousers. Where moments ago, she’d been ready to surrender, now her instincts screamed at her to act.

Vera groped wildly around her head, searching for anything she could grab, and her fingers closed on something that easily fit in her palm. Her hair splayed across her face, blocking her view.

Distantly, she heard a shout from the front of the chapel as she swung her arm at Thomas and made contact.

It was all so quick. He wasn’t on top of her anymore. Vera was free. She lifted her head a fraction, and her hair fell away from her eyes. Arthur stood above her, having bodily thrown Thomas off her. Thomas had tumbled backward over the destroyed statue and now clung to the lifeless stone, trying to heft himself back up. Arthur’s sword was drawn, and the last vestige of rage hadn’t yet fallen from his face as he stared at Thomas in shock.

What had been a monster beyond reckoning was now replaced by a terrified man, barely clinging to life. In his attempt to rise, Thomas only made it to his knees. His eyes were clear and filled with fright. He clutched at his throat as blood gushed in horrible voluminous squirts between his fingers.

Vera rolled over onto her knees and pushed herself up, transfixed, as Thomas’s breaths grew shallower, and his eyes bulged while he gurgled. He opened his mouth, and blood dumped from it as freely as if from an upended bucket.

It was perhaps only seconds of this sputtering, gasping, and squelching that felt an eternity. They echoed through the chapel’s pristine acoustics, a chorus that was the song of death. As the stretches of silence between his breath lengthened, the color drained from Thomas’s face before he collapsed, wide-eyed and blood-drenched and completely still on top of the broken statue.

Vera’s eyes flashed to Arthur’s sword, shining and clean, reflecting brilliantly in the dim light. She looked down at what her hand had found in desperation: Thomas’s small knife. The knife he’d wiped clean on her dress that was now freshly bathed in ruby-red blood.

Vera stared at Thomas’s body, not initially able to grasp that she now looked upon a corpse. His face was pressed against the statue’s pregnant belly so that his cheek was mashed up next to his vacantly staring eyes, as lifeless as the stone beneath him. Blood trickled from a mouth hung slack.

As she waited for Thomas to draw a breath that would never come, her breathing accelerated. So fast, until it all lodged somewhere between mouth and lungs, useless air hanging in the void.

What the fuck just happened? And for Christ’s sake, why?

Arthur’s sword clattered to the floor as he knelt next to her. He lay a wary hand on her back. It was like Vera had forgotten how to use air. She gasped over and over, barely able to draw in a shallow sip. She hardly felt Arthur’s second hand on her upper arm. Vera turned to him, trying to anchor herself in something breathing, something alive. His face was a blur, an abstract smudge against a backdrop of chaos.

“Guinevere.” She thought he’d said her name. She couldn’t be sure over a riotous ringing in her ears. When had that started?

Vera sat up, her panic rising with her. She’d survived Thomas. She’d killed Thomas, and now she could not breathe. Maybe his last blow to her head was killing her. What if she was bleeding as much as Thomas had, only all of hers was inside her head, causing her brain to swell and forget how to perform basic, life-sustaining tasks?

Vera felt Arthur behind her, his arm reaching under hers and across her torso as he helped her stand. She clutched his forearm to her chest, but she found right away that her legs couldn’t hold her weight. Her knees buckled, and she fell back against him. Her attempts to draw in air grew louder and more frantic by the second.

“I—I can’t breathe,” she choked.

“You’re safe. You’re all right.” Arthur’s voice broke through her panic as he lowered with her to the floor. He leaned back against the wall, knees drawn up on either side of her as he held her to his chest.

“Breathe,” he said, and as if to show her how, he took a deep breath, his chest rising against her back. She tried. She tried so desperately that her nails dug into his arm from the effort.

“I can’t!” She managed to force the words from her.

“You can,” he said as he continued his steady breaths. He spoke more quietly, right next to her ear. “You already are. Slow down. Come on, with me.”