In that high place there were no people, only furze and heather and stunted thorn trees, deer and foxes and wind and stones. But giants used to live on the moor, Nurse had told me. Great stones taller than two men stood on end where the giants had placed them, maybe to play at quoits, for huge hoop-shaped stones lay strewn here and there. They must have been playful giants, because they had balanced the logan stones atop the cliffs also, stones the size of six horses, yet they rocked in every breeze as gently as cradles. The giants were gone now, Nurse said. Heroes had thrown them into the sea. Once I had asked her if Daddy had ever thrown a giant into the sea and she had laughed, but then she had said yes, he might have done so.

Maybe Daddy was in the sea now. Maybe a giant had come back and thrown him in. Maybe that was why everyone was acting so strange.

The steep moor slowed me to a walk. I trudged up the rocky hillside with no idea where I was going or why. In the distance, dust rose. That meant horsemen coming. Usually it meant Daddy coming home, and the castle folk would shout and Mother would come out and stand on the steps of the keep.

I did not know what it meant this time.

Caer Tintagel looked small below me now. Silent. Gates open like a beached fish’s mouth.

I came to a circle stone standing on edge, bigger than a millstone, with a hole through it larger than I was tall. I climbed into the hole, turned sideways to make myself part of the stone and sat, waiting.

The dust had come closer, and in it I could see ghostlike shapes of men walking, silent, their heads down, their hands behind them. The ones on horses, the knights, herded the walking men like cattle, prodding them with their spears.

After that came more knights riding double file with their lances raised and in the fore a flag flying. A giant flag shaped like flames. Then I saw that the flames had form. A red dragon.

The wind made the dragon seem alive. I slipped through the quoit stone and lay on the ground behind it, hiding. I saw no more.

Perhaps that is what made such a difference between me and Morgause, afterward: that she saw Uther Pendragon ride into Tintagel, driving his prisoners before him, and she saw Mother walk out, barefoot and proud and pale in only her chemise, to surrender our home to him. And that I did not.

It was not until years afterward that I understood how Uther Pendragon had tricked Mother with Merlin’s magic illusion the night before and bedded her. She never spoke of it.