A/N: I want to go ahead and apologize to everyone who has me on author alert. I know my updating has been ridiculous and you've probably decided my stories aren't worth it by now. I've just been on break with lots of free time. But that ends today, so I will probably go back to updating like a normal person now! ~ end of announcement ~

I know that it is a short chapter, but I was in sort of a hurry.

Vera sat in her chair, eyeing her bed. She hadn't slept well last night, and she knew that she should nap, but she wasn't tired. Well, that wasn't exactly true: she was tired. But she wasn't sleepy.

She sighed to herself. Much to her frustration, the king was still being difficult. She wished he would make things easy on them both. Her father had told her not to stop until she had the information on Emrys, and no one with a sense of self-preservation ever disobeyed her father. That was how he managed to rule over the entire group of Mortdestin, after all; his stern command. She hadn't inherited that from him, sadly.

As Vera sat there, she felt her mind drawn back to the questioning. Her hands clenched into fists as she remembered how valiantly he'd tried to hold in the pain, but every time his eyes opened and he looked at her, the pain seemed to flare up and become worse. "Guinevere…" It had been practically ripped from his throat through his teeth, and then tears started leaking from his eyes.

Vera stood up quickly. She rubbed her hand across her forehead, trying to relieve the headache she had.

Maybe when she got back she would ask her father if she could stay away from missions like this. But she knew that he wouldn't grant her wish, he would just tell her that it "got easier". So she shook the slightly sick feeling off with a bit of effort.

She had to admit she pitied King Arthur, but there was no crime in that. He was a victim of destiny. He was just a subject of the prophecies that wanted to repress the world and keep the earth's inhabitants in a rigid, restricted structure… He hadn't even known, from what they'd said, that he was The Once and Future King.

As a thought occurred to her, she sat back down and rubbed her hands together. If… if he hadn't known who he was, what if Emrys didn't know who he was? "Emrys"… "Immortal". What if it wasn't a name?

That would mean Arthur actually didn't know… She would have to look into this.

There was a knock at her door.

"It's not locked," she called, staring at the wall in front of her, deep in thought.

The door opened to reveal some man whose name she wasn't familiar with. He wasn't someone she usually interacted with, but he wore the brown robes of the Mortdestin. Then why did he look so…?

Past him, the sound of the intruder alarm was going off.

He stared at her and she at him for a second.

"Sorry, wrong room!" he said, and ducked out again.

She sat for another second or two, staring at the open door, and then she leapt to her feet and ran out the door, but the man was gone. A guard ran up from behind her and grabbed her arm. "Intruders, milady!" he cried.

She blinked at him. "Yes," she said. "I figured that out. Head downstairs, guard the king."

He nodded and ran off. For Vera's part, she went the direction she thought the man who poked his head into her room had gone—and that direction was another, longer way to the dungeons and King Arthur.

"Where now?" Gwaine said, who decided to stay behind the warlock after Merlin had pulled him out of the wrong room and taken him back the opposite way.

In response, Merlin pulled him into an alcove. "We have these in Camelot, too," he said. "Very useful."

"What are we doing here?"

Several men ran past, and Merlin smiled. He looked a little like a wild animal with that expression, and Gwaine was glad that the warlock was on his side. "They're going to assume we're here to save Arthur," he said. "So they'll probably head to Arthur. We'll just follow them."

As he stepped out of the stone niche, Gwaine followed, sword out and looking around for any sort of threat. "That makes sense," he agreed, and followed Merlin again, keeping an eye out for people approaching from behind.