“. . . not a seemly woman, to my mind,” King Lothe was declaring, his voice echoing harshly between the stone walls, “gadding about the kingdom without so much as a maid for escort.”

Queen Morgause said something. She spoke so softly always that I could not hear her. But Morgan le Fay’s words flew to me clear and saucy. “What, my lord? You think she should be home in her tower, pining for her husband?”

“I think she should be wary of meddling.”

“What you must understand about Nyneve,” Morgan le Fay said merrily, “is that she married Pelleas because she could have her way with him. And because she could not have Arthur; he was already taken.”

They laughed. It made me sweaty and cold to hear them talking about Nyneve and laughing. I had not known she was married. Sometimes I had thought that I would marry her when I grew up; now I felt foolish and shamed. I began to edge away.

“Why should that stop her?” King Lothe growled. “She could bed him anyway and have a brat by him. Pelleas would not mind if his wife had a brat by such a mighty King.”

Queen Morgause got up and ran. Toward me. My heart froze like a frightened rabbit, I froze in the shadows—and she ran past me with a face like stretched parchment; I think she did not see me at all. Her dark eyes darted, lost. I had never seen her run before, not even when Gawain was thrown from his colt onto the rocks and lay with his head bleeding.

“In druid days, not long ago,” Morgan le Fay was saying coolly to King Lothe, “it was the king’s right, if he came to visit you, to take your wife to his bed, and if she bore his son it was an honor and a blessing.”

“Bah,” King Lothe said, his voice reined the way it had been with Nyneve; he was in a rage, but he did not dare to cross a sorceress, though he bullied Morgause without fear. It must have been a great thing, if you were a woman, to be a sorceress. “You have told me this before. And I—”

“I have also told you that in olden times the most holy kings wed their own sisters.”

King Lothe barked out a laugh that frightened me. I stepped back and nearly stumbled over Gull, who was quivering at my feet.

“And in the children of such unions,” Morgan le Fay was saying as if King Lothe had not laughed, “the blood of the king ran doubled.”

“What is your game?” King Lothe asked so fiercely that I trembled.

“Ask, rather, what is Nyneve’s game in bringing him here.”

“I have asked myself. Often.”

“It is simple.” Morgan’s tone sang with glee like a skylark. “She wants to keep him away from me.”

“Why?”