He threw the ruined dress aside and began tending Vera’s shoulder straightaway, cleaning the wound and pouring liquid that smelled of vinegar on it. She didn’t think to feel exposed in her sports bra and knickers as she hissed at the sharp sting of acid burning into her shoulder. She would have recoiled through the mattress if she could have.

Arthur cringed with her. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He applied a sticky goo to bond the edges of her punctured skin together and wrapped her shoulder tightly with a strip of bandage, again drawing a groan through Vera’s gritted teeth. Again, he apologized, his face matching the sound of her pain.

Arthur moved to do the same for the wound at her thigh, so careful not to look at her nearly naked body. “Neither of these are too deep,” he muttered.

“It was a short knife,” Vera said with a grimace as Arthur pulled the bandage tight around her thigh.

He looked at her as if he had a thousand things to say in response. “It was long enough,” he said. “Long enough to do this to you. And long enough to end him.”

Dread and regret in the first half, grim satisfaction in the latter.

“Can you hold this on the back of your head?” he asked.

Vera took another cloth from him and pressed it against her head wound. She had not realized before now that her circlet was gone, and she wondered where it lay in the chapel’s upheaval. She wondered, too, where her ruined embroidery piece ended up and what the first person who stumbled upon the scene might think.

Arthur turned his attention to cleaning the blood from her body. There was no telling what was hers and what had come from Thomas. He meticulously wiped it all away. Then he covered her with a blanket and moved on to her head.

His face was so near to hers and so controlled. Her eyes went to that muscle in front of his ear, and—yes, there it was: the bulge there, the only indication that he was clenching his teeth. For some reason, being this close to him made her cry again. She tried not to, but he’d already noticed. Of course he’d noticed. His brow furrowed as he picked up a clean cloth and swept it beneath her eyes. She didn’t want him to wipe tears with the dirt and dust and blood. It was too much, too vulnerable. The effort to stop was fruitless, as good as opening a water spigot all the way when she’d meant to tighten it down.

Vera shuddered from her sobs and forced herself to breathe deeply. One breath (push it down, bury it), another (steadier now), and a final one. Her tears stopped.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice dull.

“Stop.” Arthur practically growled it. “Stop doing that—making yourself go …” He shook his head as he searched for the word. “Empty.”

A spark stirred in Vera as rage bubbled up, more powerful than how badly her injuries hurt. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t exactly fall apart with the weight of existence resting on these memories. And you need a fucking potion to even be near me. You can’t even stomach it to save your kingdom. There’s something more than her betrayal, isn’t there?” she asked through a clenched jaw as she fought the pain. “So what is it? What am I missing?”

“You’re bleeding. This is not the time. Tomorrow—”

She leaned forward and grabbed his wrist, mastering the urge to cry out from the abrupt movement and instead pouring all she had, all her pain and fear and impotence, into her next words. “Now.” Her voice shook. Her hands shook. “Right now. Either you tell me whatever the fuck it is that you’ve been keeping from me, or I absolutely will go on making myself be fine because I don’t have any other way of surviving.” The exertion left her gasping for breath.

“All right,” he relented, and quickly moved his free hand to cradle the back of her neck. She was ready to berate him for it but nearly collapsed into his grasp. He eased her back down onto the pillow, his eyes holding hers with a strange glint of adoration. But she was dizzy and had to be mistaken.

“You’re right,” he said as he pulled his hands back and dropped his head between them. The logistics of caring for her left him in a posture of supplication, kneeling at her side, his hands clasped on the bed next to Vera with his head bowed. “I’ve been an utter fool.” His face bore no trace of the mask of stone. Now, all she saw was sadness and regret. “I’ve been far worse than that, and I’m so sorry.”

She nestled back into her pillows, unable to contain the groan that escaped her. But she didn’t soften her glare. “How much have you kept from me?”

“Too much.” He said it so quickly that it startled Vera out of her ire. “Everything that matters. It was wrong—”

“Tell me why you need a potion to be near me.” There would be no resting when the offer of truth was on the table.

“I don’t.” Arthur took one shaking breath before he gave in and sat down on the bed next to her, heedless of where blood marred the sheets. “When Viviane attacked Guinevere, and Merlin restarted her essence, there was so much damage that—and I don’t fully understand this—but he wasn’t sure it would work. He was able to get three parts. Three separate pieces of her essence.”

He stopped speaking and held Vera’s stare. Her heart thundered in her chest. “What does that mean?”

“There were three of you,” Arthur said. “Two other versions of Guinevere were restarted when you were. They came back before you.”

All the physical pain, the feelings of dread, even her anger at Arthur—it all abruptly vanished as Vera absorbed his words.

“What—” she began, but all that came out was an unintelligible rasp. She cleared her throat. “What happened to them?”

Arthur looked at Vera with dread-soaked resolve. “They’re dead.”

Vera inhaled sharply.

“It was the same idea as with you,” Arthur continued. “They were raised in another time. Merlin brought the first back a week after Viviane’s attack.”

“Did she remember?” Vera asked.

“She did. Not the attack. She had no recollection of that, but she remembered me after a while, who she was, about her life … And then, it was like something snapped. She became homicidal, almost rabidly so. She attacked me and the soldier who intervened, and she was killed.”

The strange phrasing was not lost on Vera.

“By you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He forged on before Vera could question it further. “At that point, neither Merlin nor I wanted it to be in vain. He insisted we try again. So much about it had been right, and it was new magic. Complicated magic. We couldn’t just give up. Merlin brought the second one back, and she seemed more like herself. She remembered about the same as the first, but she slipped into an even deeper melancholy than Guinevere—Guinevere from before. One morning, she woke …” Arthur’s voice caught. He closed his eyes and swallowed. His cheeks went red as he fought down an onslaught of emotion. He dragged his gaze back to meet Vera’s. “And there was nothing left of her. She was,” he shook his head, “sorrow incarnate.” His eyes flashed to the window. “She jumped.”

It reminded Vera of Matilda, the horror in her eyes when she saw Vera leaning against the window the other night. “And Matilda saw,” she said. She needed no confirmation, though Arthur nodded.

And the pain in his face made her ask, “Were you there, too?”

Arthur nodded.

“You saw it both times?”

“Yes.” He paused. “And the first time, too. After Viviane’s attack.”

Arthur witnessed that horror three separate times. She felt like the wind was knocked out of her. She should have reached out to comfort him, but she sat there, frozen. She couldn’t be sure if it was the story or if the shock was wearing off and leaving her empty, but a dull sick had started churning in her stomach.

“When she fell—jumped,” Arthur amended. “It was more public. People saw it, saw her body. Only from a distance, granted, but there was no denying that some sort of accident had happened. The word spread quickly, and it had to be addressed. That’s where the story about healing at the monastery came from. Merlin wanted to try again right away, and I refused. He agreed to wait a year, which also fulfilled the need for an explanation. Anyone who saw it knew she couldn’t possibly have been all right, not for a long while. Merlin spent that year trying to convince me to change my mind. The time came, and I still refused. I wanted to tell the people that Guinevere died from her injuries and leave you be where you were. Merlin went behind my back and brought you anyway. All I could think to do was to stay as far away from you as possible so that it didn’t end as it had before.” He looked at her apologetically, pleadingly.