“Vera,” he said, “you aren’t who you think you are.”

Her eyebrows shot up as the hairs on the back of her arms sounded the beginnings of an alarm.

“Sir,” she said, forcing the politeness, “you’ve never met me. You don’t know me. As I said, the pub’s closed.”

She stood quickly and was ready to tell him off further when he fixed her with a piercing gaze. It stopped her.

“I know a great deal more than you do,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Chills rose on both arms now. Vera had dealt with drunks and creeps of all ilk but never anyone whose focus centered on her. As every ounce of her gut screamed at her to leave, she stood rooted on the spot, trying to figure out what to say to someone who had so entirely disarmed her.

His eyes flashed away from Vera’s toward the doorway behind her. She heard a clatter and the crash of porcelain before she turned to see. Allison was standing there with silverware and broken plates splayed about her feet. Vera’s instinct was to rush to help her mother clean up the pieces, but she was transfixed by the horrified recognition on Allison’s face.

“Good gracious. It …” Allison’s voice wavered, thick with emotion. “Is it—it can’t be time already?”

Vera’s eyes ping-ponged back and forth between them. There was pity on the man’s face. He nodded at Allison, a minute gesture.

Her mum looked as shattered as the dishes on the floor.

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” Vera asked. She heard the panic rising in her voice, and she hated it. She dropped her hands on the table to steady herself.

Allison stood there, shaking her head in tiny, frantic movements. Something was deeply wrong. In all of Vera’s life, she’d never seen her mum like this.

The man lay his hand on top of Vera’s fingers. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t pull away.

“Why don’t you sit back down?” he asked quietly, gently. “Allison, you should join us, too. And maybe a medicinal drink would be wise?”

Vera pulled her hand away from him as she sank back into the chair. Allison crossed the pub like a ghost. The joy that usually lit her face, crinkling around her eyes in deep lines from years of laughter, was gone. Allison grabbed three glasses and a bottle of whiskey from behind the bar and set them on the table.

She gave each of them a robust pour. Vera hadn’t noticed how much grey streaked through her mother’s hair before now.

Allison took a drink and stared at the man, so Vera turned to him too.

“There’s no way to say this without sounding completely mad, so I’m going to say it bluntly,” he said when Vera met his eyes.

“Vera, dear, I think you know that Allison and Martin are not your birth parents?”

Vera nodded. Her parents had been forthright that they’d adopted her in infancy.

“I’m not sure how much you’ve searched for your biological parents, but if you have, I’m sure you’ve come away empty-handed.”

This was also true. The agency her parents used for her adoption had undergone some mysterious scandal and abruptly closed when she was young. At least, that was what her parents had told her. Did this man know something about her birth parents? Something that Martin and Allison had kept from her?

He went on. “Yes, well, there wouldn’t be any records. I’m going to ask for your uninterrupted attention now. You’ll want to shout down my madness, and you’re welcome to do so. But first, I need you to listen. Is that fair?”

Vera scoffed. Fair didn’t factor into this. She glared at her mother, the sense of imminent betrayal burning in her chest.

Allison was now rather tearful. “I’m so sorry, darling.”

Vera’s imagination ran wild with what this secret might be, a secret that was tearing her mother to shreds before her eyes. She fixed the man with a hard stare, resolving to stay calm through whatever was coming.

“All right,” she said.

“All right.” He nodded. “You can’t find your birth parents because they don’t exist anywhere you could search.”

Vera steeled herself. This had to be something huge. Tragic death? Maybe they were murderers or some other kind of awful criminals.

The man’s eyes drifted down to his hands. “You weren’t born twenty-two years ago. You were born in the year 612.”

With that pronouncement, every spinning thought in Vera’s mind stopped. She’d agreed to hear him out not half a minute earlier, but this was almost certainly the last thing she’d have guessed the man would say, and it was nonsense.

Without lifting his gaze, he raised his hand as he correctly guessed that Vera was within a breath of interrupting him. His eyes flicked back to her face.

“When you were twenty years old, you were injured far beyond anyone’s capacity to heal. For any of this to make a lick of sense, there is one major point you need to know, which will also sound ridiculous to you. Magic is real in our time—in your original time. It’s not something everyone has, nor that those who have can equally access. I have magic and, forsaking humility for the benefit of your understanding, I have considerable access to its gifts.” He shook his head as if the thought vexed him.

“But I couldn’t save you. I could, however, save your essence and revert you back to a very early life stage. It’s the same you, but it was like pressing a reset button. You were made an infant again.”

He must have noticed Vera taking a sharp breath and clenching her jaw. “I promise,” he said, “I will answer your questions to the extent I can but let me say this: you are irreplaceable to the future of England at the exact time when you first existed. Even with all the magic out there, you can’t rush a human’s generation. There was no way to make you who you were before without waiting, allowing you to grow to the right age again. By then, it would have been far too late.

“So, I found an unusual pathway … a workaround, if you will. I could bring you to this time, allow you to grow here, and then, once you were the correct age, I would have a small window during which I could bring you back and reinsert you after your initial accident. It requires precise spell work, but if executed perfectly, no one around would be any the wiser that you’d been away more than a year—and we’d be able to repair all that had gone awry. We are in that window today and today only.”

He folded his hands on the table and watched her expectantly. Vera didn’t break eye contact as she grabbed her whiskey and took a deep slug that stung her throat. The tangibility of its burn was a relief that grounded her in reality.

“So,” she said, “is this the part when I get to say you’re out of your fucking mind?”

“I believe that would be appropriate, yes,” he said reasonably, the faintest hint of amusement playing at his mouth.

“Right. Okay,” she said, any of hundreds of retorts swirling in her mind. But Vera’s mother’s hand was holding hers, and it was quivering. And Allison had silent tears slipping down her cheeks, which kept Vera’s tongue at bay. She wished Martin were home.

“Okay.” This time, she said it with finality. “You said the future of England depends on me? Which, like, let’s not even get into that we are already in the future of your England right now … but … pretending any of this is possible, what’s so important—”

“About you?” the man finished for her.

Vera nodded. Of the man’s absurd tale, that was the part she found least believable.

“Well, for starters, you’re married to the king.”

She laughed, but Allison’s palm sweated and shook as she squeezed Vera’s hand.

When Vera met her eyes, she found her mother again, not the shocked ghost moving in slow motion. Her face was tear-streaked, but some of her spark had returned. Allison looked intently at her daughter.

“Vera was the nickname we gave you, my love,” she said. “Your name is Guinevere.”