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Back I Am Mordred Save as PDF
Chapters (26)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Prologue
  5. BOOK ONE
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. BOOK TWO
  11. 5
  12. 6
  13. 7
  14. BOOK THREE
  15. 8
  16. 9
  17. 10
  18. 11
  19. 12
  20. 13
  21. BOOK FOUR
  22. 14
  23. 15
  24. Epilogue
  25. Sneak Peak of A TALE FROM CAMELOT: I AM MORGAN LE FAY
  26. What’s next onyour reading list?

No. One of them lay as still as dawn, its silky head resting in the curve of his elbow, its dark eyes gazing up at his face. He looked down at it, and its eyes, like deep pools of indigo, took him in for a moment like a spell.

That sober, dark-eyed, gazing babe. It was his. It was the one. He knew it.

He looked away, blinking out at the sea. He could show no weakness, for he was the King. He placed the dark-eyed babe gently in the coracle with the others, for he had no choice. The well-being of the realm depended on him.

He cast off the mooring of the coracle and pushed it away from the quay. It rode heavily on the salt water, swollen with babies, its leather sides bulging. The tide carried it out to sea, a little farther from land each time a wave broke on the shore. He stood on the quay and watched as the gray bobbing coracle blended into the gray rain, the sword-gray sea, until he could not tell the crying of the doomed babes from the crying of the gulls.

BOOK ONE

The White Shadow

1

WHEN I WAS A BABY, MY FATHER TRIED TO KILL ME.

I am Mordred, speaking to you from the wind with a raven’s thin black tongue. I am Mordred, and it is no easier to say now than it ever was. Even hundreds of years ago, when I was human and young, when I first looked wide-eyed upon Camelot, it was hard to be who I was: Mordred, the shadow on all that shone, the bad seed.

Because I am Mordred, my father placed me naked in a coracle—a frail cockleshell of a boat—and cast me adrift on the sea.

I was too young to remember the days of starvation, the nights of cold. I do not remember my own crying. And I did not at first know that I was Mordred—and I did not at first think to hate my father, because my fishermother taught me no hatred. While she told me no lies, she kept from me the whole truth of those harsh days. Here is the way she would tell the tale to me:

“Once upon a time,” she would say, “there was a poor common woman who was very unhappy.”

“That was you, Mama!” I bounced in my bed until the straw rustled, for I had heard this tale many times in my six years, the true amazing tale of myself, and I loved it. She had told it to me almost every day since I could remember.