She yelped, and a heat I had never felt before burned in my chest, and I lunged up, caught him around the knees, and toppled him.

He fell hard, for I had taken him by surprise. The fall knocked the breath out of him, and before he could move I pinned his arms with my shins and sat on his chest, hitting him in the face—Gull watched with her floppy ears hoisted in interest as I chastised him. I should not have been able to do it—Garet stood a head taller than I and two stone heavier—but an angel of rage was in me that day. It was the day I learned to fight from the heart.

“Get off me, stinking brat!” Garet tried to jounce me off, tried to wriggle free, but I settled my knees harder on his shoulders and punched him in the eye.

“Bastard!” Garet almost wept with fury, for he was used to being the one who beat me, not the other way around. As he could not hit me with his fists, he flung words at me. “Brat, you want to know why they put you in the boat? Because you were supposed to die, stupid. That’s why they put babies out to sea, to kill them when they’re wrong. Like you.”

“That’s not true!” Till then I had been grimly silent, but now I shouted, and the shouting weakened me; Garet reared up and flung me off.

“It is true!” Garet stood facing me but he did not hit me—yet—because he knew he could hurt me more with words. “Merlin said so. You’re evil born, everyone knows it. King Arthur’s son and his nephew at the same time, what sort of human is that? You’re a walking curse. You’re the one who’s going to kill King Arthur. That’s why he tried to kill you. You’re so vile your own father tried to kill you.”

He studied with satisfaction the look on my face, then knocked me to the floor with a single blow, then strode out.

3

ILAY THERE. I DID NOT WANT TO MOVE. IF I MOVED I WOULD have to begin to comprehend what Garet had told me.

Gull padded up to me and stood over me, her silky ears hanging in my face. She whined. She licked my nose.

I sat up and took her head between my shaking hands and looked into her eyes—honey-sweet eyes, soft eyes, eyes like brown pools of sorrow—as if they were the only safe place in the world.

I saw Nyneve looking back at me.

In Gull’s eyes.

Nyneve, wearing her green gown and baldric and golden dagger, her eyes sorrowful, like Gull’s.