Garet, demanding “Is it a boy or a girl?” And me saying, “I don’t know.” He laughed at me and said, “Give it here,” and he turned the puppy over in his hands and parted the fuzz between its back legs and said, “It’s a brachet. ‘Brachet’ means it’s a girl. You don’t know anything.” He handed the puppy back to me. “What will you name her?” The puppy whimpered and I said, “Gull,” for the white whimpering birds of the sea, and Garet said scornfully, “What sort of a name is that?”

King Lothe—my father, or so I thought—tapping his lopped hand against his tight lips whenever he looked at me. Kneeling before him, I asked how I had come into the coracle where my fisherfather had found me, and he cuffed me on the ear and roared, “Be silent! Know your place.” I cried out, and he cuffed me again, harder.

Gull, piddling on the floor of a passageway, and King Lothe stepping in it as he stood there talking to his seneschal with his foot in puppy pee, never noticing.

Garet, drubbing me as we sparred with wooden swords, taunting, “Fight, my so-called brother! You’re no prince. You can’t even use a sword right.”

Gawain, in one of his vile stripling melancholies, teaching me letters by firelight and striking me with the ruler. “Stupid,” he said, even though I read better than Garet did. “Of course you’d be stupid. Close bred.” I did not understand, but Garet laughed.

Queen Morgause, giving me new clothing she had made for me, a creamy woolen tunic and breeches and a cap with a pheasant feather and a fine wool mantle with a hood. I exclaimed, “Thank you, my lady mother!” but her smooth face did not smile.

The hawks and falcons, perching blind under their splendid crested hoods in the darkened mews, like carved royalty in red and golden crowns, seeming barely alive.

Gull, no longer a pup, at my heels like a white shadow as I slipped into Gawain’s chamber and put a toad in his bed.

The harper. That first winter, a harper came to Lothian; I remember nothing about him except the glory of his harp notes flying as he chanted the lays of King Arthur. It was the first time in my life I had heard music, and to me that wandering harper might as well have been the legendary Taliesin who charmed the dead back to life. The rhythm of his harp strings rang in my veins for weeks after he was gone.

Morgan le Fay.

Some things I remember quite fully even now. One of those is Morgan le Fay.

Folk said she was wicked. Assuredly she did wicked things. But I think now that she was not evil, but a bold-hearted woman bitter because there was no place for her.