She did it that afternoon. She came to the palace courtyard in a black robe and without any mask so that the horror of her fire-ravaged face, all red and scarred and ridged and twisted, was visible to us all. She was furious with herself, but committed to her promise, and she hurried about her business. A brazier was lit and fed with coals and, while the fire heated, slaves fetched baskets of potter’s clay that Morgan moulded into the figure of a woman. She used blood from a child that had died in the town that morning, and water that a slave swept up from the courtyard’s damp grass, and mixed both with the clay. There was no thunder, but Morgan said the counter-charm did not need thunder. She spat in horror at what she had made. It was a grotesque image, that thing, a woman with huge breasts, spread legs and a gaping birth canal, and in the figure’s belly she dug a hole that she said was the womb where the evil must rest. Arthur, Taliesin and Guinevere watched enthralled as she moulded the clay and then as she walked three times round the obscene figure. After the third sunwise circuit she stopped, raised her head to the clouds and wailed. For a moment I thought she was in such pain that she could not proceed and that her God was commanding her to stop the ceremony, but then she turned her twisted face towards me. ‘I need the evil now,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

The slit that was her mouth seemed to smile. ‘Your hand, Derfel.’

‘My hand?’

I saw now that the lipless slit was a smile. ‘The hand that binds you to Nimue,’ Morgan said. ‘How else do you think the evil is channelled? You must cut it off, Derfel, and give it to me.’

‘Surely,’ Arthur began to protest.

‘You force me to sin!’ Morgan turned on her brother with a shriek, ‘then you challenge my wisdom?’

‘No,’ Arthur said hurriedly.

‘It is nothing to me,’ she said carelessly, ‘if Derfel wants to keep his hand, so be it. Ceinwyn can suffer.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

We sent for Galahad and Gulhwch, then Arthur led the three of us to his smithy where the forge burned night and day. I took my lover’s ring from the finger of my left hand and gave it to Morridig, Arthur’s smith, and asked him to seal the ring about Hywelbane’s pommel. The ring was of common iron, a warrior’s ring, but it had a cross made of gold that I had stolen from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn and it was the twin of a ring Ceinwyn wore.