“Is he … jousting?” Vera asked. “You lot have jousting?”

Arthur nodded. “We have a tournament in Camelot every spring. It’s the only time of the year all the knights gather in one place. Largest tourney in the kingdom,” he said with no small measure of pride.

“That …” Percival looped back around to make another pass. “I’m a poor historian, but I am almost certain this should not exist yet. Not for several hundred years.” Plenty of Camelot had advancements beyond what she expected, all owing to magic. But things like having the orb lights and magically heated water made sense. Of all things, why would magic advance the advent of jousting?

Arthur nodded to Randall in the distance, who raised his hand and gave a stiff wave. “It came about during the wars. I think it was a soldier from the Frankish Kingdom who introduced us to it … but we started playing at it between battles to ease the tension, and it became rather popular.”

Maybe that explained it, and jousting had some earlier origin in France.

Percival dropped the shattered remnants of one lance, rode close to Randall to take a fresh one from him, and started his next charge.

“Just watching him practice is rather thrilling,” she said.

Arthur leaned against the fence next to her and eyed her.

“What?” she asked defensively, but Vera lived for moments like this. Tiny, private gestures that proved his promise of friendship wasn’t merely for show.

He grinned. “Do you want to try it?”

“Me?” Vera laughed, though Arthur didn’t. “I—oh God, I could never. I’d be a wreck … If I didn’t fall or die, I’d probably lose control and kill someone.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Arthur said in his quiet way. “You should give it a go.”

“And pray tell, who’s going to teach me?”

“I can,” he said.

Not two days later, Grady saddled their horses, and Vera and Arthur rode into the woods where she and Lancelot often ran. She followed him to a clearing, fully outfitted the same as the jousting practice arena in town.

He’d thought of everything and prepared accordingly, having at the ready armor that was likely made for a teenage boy, her running clothing to wear under, and three sizes of lances. After turning away to give her privacy as she changed from her gown to trousers and top, he helped her dress in the armor. First, a thicker pair of breeches to go over her own. On top, a long-sleeve padded shirt.

“This is called a gambeson,” Arthur said helpfully as he held it aloft, ready for her to dive her head and arms into it, followed by chest plate with metal skirting that hung down over the tops of each of her legs, then shoulder and arm pieces strapped on somewhat like a harness.

He knelt down to secure the full leg pieces, each one tying at the back just beneath her bottom. Her skin tingled as the backs of his fingers brushed against her thighs. She needed it over immediately—and wanted it to never end.

He armored up as well. They started by working on simply riding a horse in armor, which was challenging enough. She practiced with the lightest lance next, and he took her through the motions with the practice plate at an absolute snail’s pace. She still missed twice. But this was their first of a handful of sessions over the following weeks. Session by session, Arthur added more elements of the joust.

All along, he told her how well she was doing and how quickly she was learning. Vera gave a perfectly adequate performance, but he treated her like God’s gift to medieval sport. And she charged into practice runs shouting quotes from films that would be pure nonsense to Arthur, but it made him laugh, which was a lovely sound, so she kept at it.

He made the other part of their act, the feigning love, easy … far too easy.

He needed only to catch her eye while his face was bright with laughter for Vera’s insides to dance. When he took her hand, when his arm casually snaked around her waist at the market, or, worse, when they shared even a quick, chaste kiss in public for show, any notion of pretense evaporated. Her mind was utterly addled for him. The potion had done its work well, and it hurt every time Vera remembered the truth: that her feelings weren’t really hers.

But she didn’t want it to stop—and it was effective. The more affectionately Arthur behaved toward her, the more people sought her attention nearly as much as his. And he was either a practiced diplomat aware of the impacts of their act, or he was still magic-addled into adoring her, too.

Perhaps both, because he behaved that way when it was just the two of them as well. Before Arthur retreated to the side chamber to sleep, they spent most evenings together. They’d sat down to finish the last chapter of The Hobbit when a knock came at the door. It was a letter for Arthur. A shadow passed over his expression as he read it.

“What is it?” Vera asked from where she sat on the bed with her legs crossed beneath her.

“The Northern Lords.” He sighed as he tossed the letter on the desk. “They’re threatening to secede from the kingdom.”

Hearing it was like being punched in the stomach. Vera pressed her hands to her face. “It’s my fault. Guinevere’s father. Wulfstan … they were fine until I showed up.”

Arthur began shaking his head before she finished speaking. He sat down in the chair next to the bed. “They’ve had different notions of how to structure a kingdom all along. There wouldn’t even be an alliance without this marriage. The lords were hesitant about how unification diminished their power, but with the threat of invasion and the need for protection so high, they had little choice.” He chuckled ruefully as he leaned forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees. “But their people want to be a part of Britain. How do we capitalize on that? Come to that, how do we help the whole nation remember that we’re trying to build something different?”

“By doing it,” Vera said without thinking. “You have to actually build something different and not just say you’re different.”

The corners of his lips ticked upward.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was—”

“No. You’re right.” He rubbed at his chin as his other hand tapped one finger against his knee. “I can’t simply say that I want a governance that shares power while the lords remain the only ones with meaningful say. But how do we build that without power being stretched so thin that it collapses in on itself?”

Vera waited for Arthur to continue. He didn’t.

“Sorry, are you wanting me to answer?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Arthur, I’m not—” She huffed a laugh. “The entire purpose of my existence is recovering Guinevere’s memories. If you don’t need them, the best I can do until the kingdom can break the curse on its own is to not cause any more harm. I’m not anybody. I’m a vessel for a woman who is … gone.” They were words she’d said before. Words she believed. She’d never said them to Arthur, though. It felt a little more like a recitation and less like the truth than it once had.

His face had gone rigid as she spoke. Vera tensed at the thought that he might go distant from her again. But he got up and knelt on the bed next to her, looking her squarely in the eyes. “You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

“We are better because you are here. You don’t have to be Guinevere to matter. You, Vera, matter very much to this kingdom.”

She dropped her chin to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes, I have brought it to the brink of war—”

She felt his hand on her shoulder and the other gently lifting her chin. His lips were so close to hers. She yearned to close the gap. “You matter to me. I don’t want to do this without you. I want to know what you think.”

She wished she could have fallen into him. Instead, she scooted over to make room for him to properly sit next to her. They wouldn’t solve all the kingdom’s problems that night, but it was the beginning of something. The weight they each bore, with no secrets left between them, became a shared burden.