And with a quiet voice in Vera whispering that perhaps she could do something good here—something good with him—they put ruling to bed for the night to finish the final chapter of The Hobbit.

“It’s a wonderful story, isn’t it?” Arthur laid the book aside. “Going on a life-changing adventure and then coming back home? Maybe you’ll have your own There and Back Again to write soon.”

“Maybe,” she said, hoping he couldn’t hear her uncertainty. It was only January, after all. The end of spring was a long way off. There was no sense in worrying about that now. “This book is actually the story’s beginning.”

“Really? Does Bilbo have more adventures?”

Vera listed her head to the side. “Hm, not exactly. It’s more about the ring he found. It turns out to be, like, the most powerful thing in Middle Earth made by this dark lord Sauron to rule the world or what-have-you.” She sat up more in her excitement. “Anyway, Bilbo’s nephew has to go on a quest to destroy it. That one’s a trilogy called The Lord of the Rings. It’s amazing. They even made them into these fantastic films.”

Arthur’s smile warmed as he listened. “Do you know them well enough to tell me the story?”

“No!” Vera said, scandalized. “I mean, yes, I know them well enough, but I can’t do that. I don’t want to spoil them for you!”

He laughed. “How would it—” His expression softened. “Vera, I’m never going to read those books in my lifetime. And I’m certainly never going to watch those films.”

He was right, of course. She knew that, but still. “I can’t,” she insisted. “What if we can convince Merlin to bring them back …”

When he takes me home.

She couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Arthur understood.

“I’d like that,” he said, his eyes glinting. He seemed happy. Vera wished she could join in his joy. Arthur belonged in another world, and there were some things—many things—they would never share. It didn’t matter that her feelings for him were magic’s fabrication; she decided she would not waste a moment of it.

He stood to leave, as he always did when they finished reading.

“Will you stay?” Vera asked before she had time to change her mind.

When he hesitated and looked back at her with a flicker of longing, it urged her on.

“I know you slept in the chair a few nights. And that you come in during the night to make sure I’m all right.” She’d been awake a few of the times, though she pretended not to be. “You’re running a young country that’s in a bit of a shitstorm. Good sleep is the least of what you need right now.” She tried to smile reassuringly, but it did nothing to unknit the furrow of his brow.

“I don’t want you to feel …”

“I feel safe with you,” she said.

Vera saw it again: a flicker of shame as brief as a spark’s life. “All right,” he said.

She scooted to the side that she’d been sleeping on, and Arthur settled in on the other side.

They did not touch that night, but he never went back to sleeping in the chair or even the other chamber, and it was not long before the guise of sleep became a refuge for what they would not allow in the light of day.

Under the cover of unconsciousness, Vera and Arthur’s arms found one another. It started innocently when she rolled over in the space inches before sleep, and her hand landed on his chest. A reflex from a love that was gone—it was how she’d slept with Vincent almost nightly, but she froze as she realized where she was and who her arm was draped across. His eyes didn’t open, but his breathing changed. He was awake. He didn’t pull away. He covered her hand with his and held it.

But she always instigated it. One night, when she was determined not to indulge her need for his touch, Vera lay on her side facing away from Arthur. It surprised her when he rolled close behind her, slid his arm around her torso, and held her, gently rubbing his thumb back and forth across her collarbone.

It elated and frightened her in equal measure to realize that, in his arms, Vera felt like she was home.

Her nights with Arthur had them staying up late, reading and dreaming. And, come morning, Vera didn’t want to get out of bed when he was next to her. She felt a little guilty because she and Lancelot were running markedly less, though he hadn’t seemed to mind. Vera suspected there’d been something else—someone else—occupying his hours. Perhaps the lady he’d snuck off with in Glastonbury was a Camelot local?

He didn’t pry about the status of her and Arthur’s … whatever this was, so she abided by the same courtesy. And he’d found quite a friend in Gawain, of all people. Their pairing actually worked astoundingly well. Lancelot acted as Gawain’s social interpreter as the mage got to know the gifted of the town and started training them.

Vera and Arthur arrived at the stables one morning to fetch their horses and found Grady seated with Gawain in the grass outside, a single log hovering between them, rotating slowly. Grady’s forehead crinkled in concentration, though Vera had seen him juggle about eight sticks of wood at a time, all far larger than this one that hung low in the air. Sweat beaded on his brow despite the ground beneath him harboring a silvery kiss of frost.

“That’s it,” Gawain said. “Very good, Grady!” It was a low bar, but Vera felt a surge of affection for the mage at the kindness in his voice and for the simple fact that he used Grady’s name.

“Do you know what he’s doing?” Arthur murmured to Vera, but the noise was enough to draw Grady’s attention. The log froze in midair before it tumbled to the ground.

“Your Majesties! I—I’m sorry. I lost track of time.” He glanced eastward at a beam of shining pearl running up the length of the castle wall like an iridescent stripe of paint. Only it wasn’t paint, it was the same material as all the orbs and lights throughout Camelot. And beside it were distinct markings: the first one a third of the way up signaling daybreak, another third for midday, and at the top, sunset. It was a clock—one of Gawain’s many additions to Camelot over the past four weeks in collaboration with none other than the castle priest, Father John.

Vera hadn’t thought to wonder how Father John could time chapel services perfectly with the sunrise each week, but it so happened that was his gift. He knew the sun’s position in the sky at all times—how many hours it would be visible overhead and how long before it returned overnight. The pearly strip was lit from the ground up to between the first two notches, signaling it was midmorning. There was a magic clock down in the village and two at the castle.

The boy scurried into the stables, shouting apologies over his shoulder. Gawain held the log in front of him with one hand as he stood and examined it.

“What were you doing?” Vera asked.

He handed her the log as if that was an answer. It was lighter than it should have been and felt hollow. She passed it to Arthur as Gawain said, “Grady removed almost all the moisture from that log.”

“Grady did that?” she asked. “Did you give him that power? I thought he just had the power to move wood.”

Gawain eyed her with scathing suspicion, extending his hand to reclaim the log. “I didn’t give him anything. Most gifts are more complex than they seem and can be used in far broader ways than their recipients appreciate. People haven’t been taught to explore the boundaries of what their gift can do, and seldom few figure that out on their own. You look at Grady now and think he has multiple gifts when he’s simply learned to use his one power to greater benefit. Outside of studying at the Magesary where we mages are trained, there’ve not been opportunities for anyone to learn about that. The select few young people who are identified as having multiple gifts and sent to train as mages usually only have one power to start … but those few happen to have a more thorough innate understanding of their single gift’s breadth—not because they truly have more than one. That comes later.”