“Drink,” Gawain said. It was a cup filled with water.

She drained it all before her vision swam into focus. Gawain had dragged his chair over and was sitting in front of her. A blessedly cool blast of air blew over her skin. He’d opened the door and extinguished the fire, too.

Vera willed herself to speak and found she couldn’t.

“I could have broken that barrier,” Gawain said quietly, his low volume a gift to her throbbing skull. “It’s the same way Merlin would do it.” He swallowed and shook his head. “You would not be all right. It would sever many of the connections in your brain, leaving you permanently changed.”

It sounded like a lobotomy. Well … plenty of people had gotten those. It wasn’t ideal, but some had good lives after, didn’t they? Different, but … maybe good.

Gawain made sure she was looking at him before he continued. “But that is the best outcome you could hope for, and it’s highly likely there would be far worse impacts. My best guess is that you would succumb to the trauma of your injuries before you could share those memories. The sort of magic that would be required to save you only exists in myth. Merlin should know that.” He stared at the smoldering embers in the hearth. “You would be dead, and all that you contained gone with you.”

It was a strange notion to consider her life like a question in an ethics class: should you take the chance of finding the key to fixing a whole world at the expense of one life?

It would have been an easy choice to make—if it had a decent shot of working. “Shit,” Vera said.

Gawain hummed a rueful chuckle. “Indeed.”

“And you’re beginning to agree with Merlin … You think my memories are needed, don’t you?” she asked.

“There’s something important within you,” he said carefully, just as he’d told her before. “But the king is right: this is not an option.”

“What am I going to do?” Vera dropped her head into her hands. “I have to fix this, Gawain.”

“If I break the barrier by force, that’s what would cause the damage. But did you feel the way it moved a bit under pressure?”

“Yes,” she said.

“With healing intervention, we could keep doing this. I push enough to chip away at the barrier but give you potion and time to heal in between sessions, and then we try again. It won’t be as fast as Merlin hopes, and it’s certainly not ideal for your well-being, but after some time, I believe it may work to dismantle the barrier. It’s likely our best option.”

He fished out a healing potion for her, but other than running hot, she already felt fine by the time she drank it.

“You’re busy. I don’t want to take any more of your time,” Vera said, thinking of whoever he’d thought he was scolding when she came in. Whether she acknowledged it or not, she was the queen, and Gawain had been beholden to drop what he was doing for her.

She was halfway to the door when he said, “Guinna?”

She turned as he carefully tucked his glass-bulbed instrument into a box beneath his desk.

“Would you like to walk with me to the festival grounds?” he asked.

She smiled as she nodded, and they left the tower in silence. Vera never felt a need to fill the quiet with Gawain.

Tables and chairs were already set for the welcome feast in the open space behind the training field. Workers rushed to and fro, stacking a buffet table with trays and plates. Five men were positioning a massive and ornate marble sculpture in the middle of it. The impressive piece had to be at least as tall as Vera, depicting a soldier with his sword raised. It was unwieldy to manage, taking all the men’s strength to keep it steady.

Gawain set to work right away, and Vera scanned the field until her eyes landed on Arthur. He stood next to Percival and Lancelot, who were seated at a table on the outskirts.

Arthur’s gaze was pulled up to her as if compelled by an unseeable force, and his face brightened, lips lifting at the corners. Butterflies exploded in her stomach. How had she ever been unsure if he was handsome?

The instant she was within reach of him, her hand was on his cheek. And when she could press her body close to his, she did. These were the yearned-for moments when she could let it all show. They were in public. Affection was good for the kingdom. Vera bowed to her adoration and kissed him, quivering with the bliss that he sank into it and slid his arm around her waist to hold her tightly.

It could have lasted for hours, and Vera would have been perfectly happy. But it should appear like any other kiss a married couple might share and decidedly not one of a desperately pining woman who thought of this man’s touch more than she’d ever care to admit. Her lips lingered on his for as long as she dared before pulling away.

He smiled at her, caressing her cheek with his thumb and laying another kiss on her forehead. “Is everything—”

“Oy!” Lancelot called. “Pardon my interruption, but we were in the middle of important business.” His effort at sounding scandalized was thwarted by the colossal grin on his face—like a kid who’d been hoping for ages that his estranged mum and dad would get back together. He gestured across the field. “Poor Merlin and Gawain are painstakingly hanging lights one by one—and you’re snogging.”

“By important business,” Arthur said conspiratorially to Vera, “he means planning the jousting tournament’s after-celebrations.”

“And,” Percival added, holding up a square of linen, “we’ve made a deal with Margaret. She’ll set aside some of her immaculate sweet cake for us if we fold napkins for her.”

“As I said,” Lancelot waved his own napkin and gestured to the pile of waiting linens on the table, “important business.”

Percival and Arthur laughed, but Vera’s smile was merely polite as she shifted to watch Gawain and Merlin raising orbs and positioning them. Both, remarkably, acted like nothing was the matter, that the one wasn’t angry and the other hadn’t plumbed the depths of her memory half an hour ago. They were good pretenders. They focused only on their task, each orb taking a few minutes to hang just right in the air.

“Why are they doing it like that?” Vera asked.

The three of them stared at her.

“What do you mean?” Lancelot asked.

“Can’t they just toss an orb, and it’ll hang where they want it to?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “No, they don’t do that.”

She turned to him. “Yours does that.”

Lancelot’s lips pressed into a line. “Mine’s a little different.”

Arthur tilted his head to the side.

“The council knights have arrived,” Lancelot said casually.

“All of them?” Arthur asked, his brow furrowed as Percival simultaneously said, “Is Elaine here?”

Lancelot laughed. “Yes. To both questions. I forgot that you carry a torch for—”

He didn’t have a chance to finish that thought as a commotion arose opposite them from the men setting the sculpture on the buffet table. The whole marble thing was wobbling dangerously, and then the enormous piece began to fall backward. There was nothing any of the workers could do about it except shout and scramble clear from where it would crash to the ground.

But the crash never came. The sculpture stopped mid-fall, dangling at a forty-five-degree angle like a dancer held low in a dip. Then, it was as if someone tossed a rope around it and began to pull it upright. It steadily rose to standing, where it wobbled back and forth on its base three times and came to a stop. Gawain stood, hand still aloft, toward the saved statue. Many spectators clapped.

But Percival’s face snapped to recognition. “That’s how it looked when magic saved me.” His voice was quiet, reverent. “That’s exactly how it looked.” He exhaled a laugh. “If Gawain had ever served with the soldiers, I’d think I’d solved the mystery of my miracle.”

Lancelot stopped folding his napkin. “He did serve with the soldiers.”