“Please hear me out,” said the woman who, if the tales were true, didn’t really need to ask.

Isabel sat back down. “You’ll excuse me if I’m just a little . . . dumbfounded?”

“I understand.”

“You saved me from Grand Lake.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I have need of you. And I have hopes that this will all turn out so that one of your—how did you put it?—shouldas will also come true for you.”

“I’m alive. I’m not just in another world?”

“Oh, I am afraid you are definitely in another world. But it’s of this world, Isabel. Just not of your time.”

“Where am I?”

“If you’ve been taught about me, you’ve been taught about Camelot?”

Isabel again just stared at her. “Surely you jest.”

Coventina laughed, a sound that was so lyrical that even the lake seemed to respond to it. The lake bubbled here and there as if something beneath couldn’t help but enjoy the joke with her. “I enjoy a good jest, as do many of the men and women of the castle. But I assure you, beyond this forest is the castle of Camelot.”

“You mean like King Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere and Mer—Oh. He really is your Merlin.”

“Or was,” Coventina said, and her eyes immediately turned from a stunning blue to a stormy gray. “But he has forsaken this world, too devastated by the destiny he fears is in Arthur’s future.” The Lady grasped Isabel’s hand. “I must bring him back. I must. I fear that eternity will be an eternal misery without him.”

“Why me?” Isabel asked, even as she tried not to show watery eyes. She was so not a crybaby, unless it was over the tragedy of a sweet and heroic man in Afghanistan or the birth of a kitten.