Upon careful examination, she discovered that Alric had been shot with an arrow in his side and had, at some point, pulled the arrow out. He had also been stabbed twice. Both times in his legs.

  She didn’t think any of the wounds were serious enough right now to kill him. But the wounds needed the right care.

  She wasn’t surprised to find the queen at her side, calling for more help from the other women. Thankfully, they all knew how to clean and sew.

  “I will need fresh, bleached cloth and alcohol. Touch the cloth as little as possible. Germs,” she added for the women’s curious looks.

  “Germs?” the queen asked.

  Genevra smiled and waved her hand. “A Welsh word.”

  Fin remained in the room, keeping off to the side while they worked. Within a quarter of an hour, the boy opened his eyes.

  “Keep it short, Commander. He’s exhausted.”

  He nodded and kept his eyes on her when he came to the bed. “You seem and sound different. Are you certain you are well?”

  Without answering, for she didn’t want to lie to him again, she stepped aside and away from the bed.

  Alric came to long enough to tell Fin that Leofric had Camelee and Hild, and her mother and he had men guarding a small part of the forest, beyond the two crisscrossed trees.

  Before Alric finished, Fin dispatched men to find his brother and give him this information. He left the keep soon after that.

  “Come, rest in my chamber, Genevra,” Queen Emma urged. “Sleep for a bit. You look weary, dear friend.”

  “I will remain here with him,” she said and fell into the nearest chair. She couldn’t tell the queen she’d gone mad. She couldn’t tell anyone any of it.

  She sat by the bed for a long time after everyone left. The room was quiet, haunted by Hild’s laughter and Camelee’s voice.

  Who was the man who she’d seen in her vision? The man who called her Guin? Whoever he was, he made her heart almost come to a full stop when she looked upon his face. Was she sharing someone else’s thoughts? How could it be? But Camelee claimed to be from the future. Did her future have the man Genevra had been waiting for her whole life?

  She shook her head at herself and thought about how Camelee didn’t want parents, nor did she want to be one. It was because of her. She was the one who had given Camelee up. She wasn’t sharing someone’s else’s thoughts. These were her memories. This was her pain she was feeling having her babies…both of her babies taken from her because of—what? She didn’t know. She didn’t remember. Was the man Camelee’s father? Had they come from the future? Is this what she couldn’t remember?

  Feeling more insane than before, she left her chair and paced before the bed. She wondered if Viviane had something to help her splitting headache.

  She stopped pacing. Who in the blazes was Viviane? Oh, she wanted to just…fall apart. For the first time in her life, the part she was aware of anyway, she wanted to let go and fall apart. She wanted to scream and shout for the years she’d spent alone, making up excuses to others because she lived alone and did not marry. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry and have children. Her heart wouldn’t let her. She pined for another. A man she did not know.

  Now she knew what he looked like. Who was he? She would go mad if she didn’t find out. She couldn’t live this way!

  Panic overwhelmed her. She threw her hands to her head and began to cry.

  Guin. Guin. Who was she? Fin had called her Gen. She shook her head. What had she forgotten all these years?

  She stopped crying for a moment and remembered Camelee telling her that she was named after King Arthur Pendragon’s castle, Camelot.

  Camelot wasn’t a person, but a place. Camelee’s name was a symbol of who she was and where she came from.

  They had given her the name to carry that night at the orphanage. She and Camelee’s father. Who was he?

  *

  “Move your arse when I tell you, Whore!”

  Leofric the Merciless, as he was called and loved reminding Camelee, took a handful of her hair and yanked her to her feet. Hild, who had been sitting beside her with her mother, began to scream. Leofric glared hatefully at the child and pulled back his fist to strike her.

  Camelee hauled back her foot first and kicked him in the groin as hard as she could. He went down in a writhing ball.

  Without haste, she picked up Hild and took Frida by the hand. “Run!”

  They ran for about ten meters when Leofric’s men took off after them. They weren’t going to get away. Dear God, don’t let this be real!

  Frida fell and broke away. Camelee stopped and tried to pull her up but she cried out. Her ankle had snapped.

  “Go!” Frida screamed, pushing her and Hild away. “Take her and run!”

  Camelee did just that. She turned, took a step, and entered a hall, cut from faceted glass…maybe diamonds. Hild was screaming in her arms, but not because they had entered someplace else.

  “Mumma! Mumma!”

  Camelee’s heart broke for her.

  “Let us take her,” said a beautiful woman who appeared by her side. “We will comfort her.”

  “No!” Camelee pulled back. “I will. She’s mine.”

  The woman smiled at a handsome man sitting in a large, glass chair at the front of the grand hall. “She has picked up much from them already.”

  “Mumma!” Hild wailed.

  Camelee looked around. “Where are we? How did we get here? There were men about to…her mother…”

  “They are gone,” said the woman.

  “Gone where?” Was everyone from back there gone? What about Wolf and Genevra? “Where are they!” she shouted. Her voice blended with Hild’s, echoing in the cavernous hall.

  The woman placed her hand on Camelee’s arm and patted it. “There now, little one. All will be well.”

  Camelee and Hild stopped crying.

  “What did you do?” Camelee asked her.

  The woman looked familiar. She had jet black hair, striped with gray, that draped her shoulders and fell to her waist. It was held away from her fathomless, violet eyes by a bronze circlet around her brow.

  “I comforted you,” the woman replied.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am called Viviane. That man is Arthur, King of Camelot, and your father.”

  Her what? Camelee blinked and felt laughter bubbling up inside. “I don’t know what you did to me, Lady, but this is serious stuff.” She looked down at Hild, calm and quiet in her arms. “How do you know you didn’t give her too much?”

  Viviane smiled and for a minute Camelee thought light came from her and bounced off the glass.

  “Daughter.”

  Camelee turned and looked at the man from the chair. Now, he was standing in front of her. King Arthur. He was tall and very handsome with gray hair at his temples and dark everywhere else.

  “Hiding is over,” he said quietly, his eyes warm with tenderness mixed with warning. “She is loose. We must band together.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are my friends?”

  “They are in their time. Nothing has changed for them, save that you are no longer there.”

  She thought of Wolf. He loved her. “Then everything has changed for one of them. What is happening? Will they remember me?”

  “Yes. I cannot tamper with memories again.”

  “Right,” Camelee scoffed. “King Arthur is fictional. Am I dreaming you?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I am real, so is Morgan, an evil sorceress bent on destroying me and taking away everyone I love.”

  “Morgan Le Fey?” Camelee asked, recalling the tales.

  “She is known by many names.”

  First the Vikings, now King Arthur? How much crazier could this get? “All right, well, I’ve heard enough. I want to go back now.”

  The man in front of her gave her a solemn look. “You cannot go back. Neither to the eleventh century nor to the twenty-first. I’m sorry, Daughter.”

  “Stop calling me that!” she hissed at him in an effort not to scream and frighten Hild. “I don’t know what’s going on. But I’m no longer participating. I’m not your daughter, and if I thought for one moment that you were my biological father, I’d slap you in your face.”

  “Child, he is the king,” Viviane reminded her softly.

  “I’m not a child. Please. Enough is enough. It’s cruel to pretend to be my father.”

  “I’m not pretending,” he told her. “Your mother, who I intend to find, is Queen Guinevere. You have a brother named—”

  “Stop!” Camelee cried out. She felt someone taking Hild out of her arms. She couldn’t do anything to stop it. She felt lightheaded. She swooned forward and fainted in the king’s strong arms.

  *

  She didn’t wake up again until the next morning. When she did, she was in a bed in a private room. There was another woman with her, smiling like a painting of some beautiful enchantress come to life.

  “I am Nimue.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Avalon.”

  Camelee’s heart pounded. Avalon wasn’t real. That meant none of this was real. She couldn’t help it that her first concern was Wolf. Was he real? Would she ever see him again?

  “He is real,” Nimue told her, leaning in. “He is rather wild though. He might change a bit of history with all the Saxons he is killing.

  “I want to go back to him. Please.”

  Nimue stared at her with wide leaf-green eyes. She appeared to be genuinely surprised. “Truly? You wish to go back to him?”

  Camelee opened her mouth but then paused.

  “You hesitate,” Nimue pointed out.

  “No.”

  “You did. You hesitated. But even if you didn’t, we cannot send you back. Too much has already changed.”

  “Then bring him to me!”

  “It does not operate that way.”

  “Then how does it operate?” Camelee demanded. “And where is Hild?”

  “She is with the other children in the apple grove. She is a wondrous child!” Nimue’s lips curled into a smile.

  “I want her with me. I don’t know you people. You took her without my consent.”

  Nimue’s smile faded. “We would never harm her.”

  “That’s nice to hear but like I said, I don’t know any of you.”

  Nimue tilted her head at her as if she were trying to read Camelee. “She is not your own child, yet you protect her as if she is.”

  “She’s an orphan…again. I feel sorry for her.”

  Nimue quirked her blue-black brow at her and rose from where she was sitting on the bed. “Is that all?”

  “Yes! What are you, a psychiatrist?”

  Nimue laughed and Camelee thought she saw a misty vapor leaving her mouth, sparkling air. Just like the air around the brooch that brought her to Wolf.

  “You know,” the enchantress said in a hushed voice. “Your father did what he did to keep you all alive.”

  “And what is it he did?” Camelee indulged with a smirk.

  “He made us all forget. Well, maybe not you or your brother, Micajah. You were both babies when he and your mother had to give you up, so there was not much for you to forget.”

  “Oh, my goodness, please stop,” Camelee begged as tears poured from her eyes. “This is cruel. I will die if you don’t stop.”

  Nimue reeled back horrified. “Oh, dear, we do not mean to make you suffer more. I will return in a short while. Rest.” Nimue began to dissolve and disappeared into a sparkling puff of air. Were she and Viviane responsible for the brooch?

  Camelee hopped out of bed. She was still dressed. Who had moved her to this bedroom? Odd that though the walls and ceiling were made of glass, she couldn’t see what was on the other side. The glass was not see-though. Every piece of furniture was made of different colored glass. The mattress was not glass. Many things weren’t, but the room was the most beautiful room she’d ever been in.

  Someone knocked.

  “Come in.” The door opened and the man who claimed to be King Arthur and, more importantly, her father entered the room.

  “Nimue tells me you wish to return to the Vikings.”

  “I would like him to be brought here,” she answered, not allowing herself to cower to him, king or not. “As I was.”

  “That is impossible. He does not share my blood, nor does he possess any magic in his veins. The only reason we were able to bring Hild through is because she is small and clung to you. He must stay where he belongs.”

  She scoffed in his face. “Since when does staying where you belong matter to you people? I want him brought here. Please!”

  “I cannot, Camelee. I am sorry. I don’t have the power to bring him here.”

  The thought of never seeing Wolf again made it difficult to breathe. She loved him. She did. “Why was I sent to him?” she cried.

  “Morgan used Mordred to try to kill me. My own son. I could not allow her to come near you and your brother. I foolishly enchanted the brooch to help you all find your true love. I didn’t know it would hurl you through time until I heard from Kestrel from the fifteenth century. But she was happy. It was the only gift I could ever give you.”

  “And now you’re snatching it from my hands?”

  “I will not send you back while Morgan is free. She is devious, Camelee. I thought one of the sisters sent out the brooch to you all, but it wasn’t anyone here. It was her.”

  “Wolf is a berserker,” she told him hopefully, not really hearing his words. “He will protect me from her.”

  The king shook his head. “He has no magic. She would destroy him and then you.”

  Camelee felt her anger boil up in her. She didn’t care who he was, or why he did it. He’d left her and she had grown up feeling abandoned. She realized now that it was mostly her adoptive parents who made her feel this way. But that hurt was born in the orphanage. “You don’t get to be worried about me, Dad!”

  “It nearly killed us to give you up, my daughter. Your poor mother wept until the day Merlin and I cast the spell. I didn’t know who you were, Camelee. I didn’t even know who your mother was,” he told her gently coming to her. “It was the only way to be safe.”

  “Do you realize that I know these characters? Morgan, Mordred, all of you! You are all from books. My mind is somehow playing—”

  “Camelee!” his otherwise gentle baritone voice boomed off the walls. He stood over her, angry and foreboding. “Enough of this. You are my daughter, behave like it! If I tell you something, you must believe me, for I would not be dishonest with you. Morgan’s heart is twisted against good. She is dangerous in her madness. I separated us and made us forget who we were to protect us all.”

  “What changed?”

  “Believing that we had captured her, and we were now safe, I lifted the spell. She escaped and is now free among us again. Now that memories are being restored, it will be easier for her to find you.”

  Was she supposed to believe this? Why not? Hadn’t she traveled back in time to Viking England? Wasn’t the name Pendragon responsible for setting her world upside-down?

  “Okay, well you know what?” If he wanted to be her father so bad, then he was going to be the one to hear what she’d always wanted to tell him. She had issues and there weren’t any psychiatrists here. “If you are my father—you ruined my life. In all my success, my heart was always broken because you abandoned me. The Pendreys forgot about me. But you were first.”

  His pretty blue eyes glistened with tears. He said nothing for an eternal moment. “I had to keep her away from you. If she hurt you, I would have done regretful things.”

  She listened to the rest of his defense and, deep in her heart, she wanted to believe him, trust him. But she’d never learned how to do those things, and everything was simply too unbelievable. It was easier to tell herself none of it was real than to believe it.

  What better man to fantasize about being her long-lost father than King Arthur Pendragon, a hero from her childhood?

  That more than likely meant that her dream man, Wolf Kristiansen, eleventh-century Viking was not real either. None of this was.

  “I would like to be alone.”

  “Camelee,” the king tried.

  “Please.”

  He swallowed and nodded, reluctantly giving in. “Of course. I will make sure you are not disturbed.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wolf circled two of Leofric’s men after Fin and the other men tied the two Saxons to the trees. Somehow, Leofric evaded him. But Wolf would find him and kill him. He wouldn’t stop until he did. The Saxon had taken her. His Camelee.

  Alric had recovered enough to tell him that Leofric had her and Hild and her mother. He’d had Alric, too, and ordered his death, but the young cook was wily and fast. He killed the Saxon solider and escaped, but he hadn’t gone far when men hiding behind the trees shot at him. They aimed for his legs to stop him, not kill him. They liked to bring their prey to their leaders alive.

  The first thing Wolf had done was bring forty of the Danes’ best men in the forest to eliminate the threat. Three hundred more men from the king’s army followed an hour behind.

  It took a few hours to find Leofric’s men. Wolf went mad looking for him. He’d killed more than he could count. Blood covered his hands, streaked his face. He bellowed Leofric’s name as he hacked the Saxon men to pieces. But Leofric wasn’t there.

  Fin found the two who claimed to know about the “woman he was after”.

  “Leofric knows you love her,” one of the men told him.

  “Where is she?” That was all Wolf wanted to know. “I do not care about that coward you follow. Where is the woman?”

  “We were…we were chasing her. Her and that little one and her mother. The mother fell and the men overtook her.”

  Wolf closed his eyes and fought to control the desire to shove his blade into this man.

  “And then the woman and the child disappeared, my lord.”

  “They were there and then they were gone, and the air was all silver and Christmasy, or as you heathen would say, yule-ish.”