I had never ridden there on my own. Never so far on my own. And even when I had gone hawking or hunting with others, we had ventured only to the fringes of that wilderness. But now Gull scampered merrily into green shadow as dark as the jewel on Nyneve’s dagger pommel.

“Gull! No!” One stride into that forest, I felt my cockerel courage fly away; I wanted only to be back in Lothian. I tugged my oversized steed to a head-tossing halt. “Gull!”

Out of sight in the mazy green depths, she barked.

“Gull! Come here!”

She barked again, farther away. Off to one side something gave a grunting snarl. To the other side something laughed—I did not know what.

Only fear of losing Gull could have made me go on. That, and my brute of a horse nearly tearing the reins from my hands. With a cry of despair I leaned forward, and the war stallion leaped into the wildwood at a gallop.

“Gull!”

Just for an eye blink I glimpsed her ahead, a blur of white bobbing like a ghost in the gloom under the towering trees. Then she whisked away, gone again.

“Gull!” I sent my great blundering steed charging after her. “Gull! Bloody damn, where are you going?”

For what seemed far too long I hurtled down the meandering trails at a headlong, crashing, branch-lashing gallop, sometimes catching a glimpse of her, most often catching only twigs across my face, my chest heaving with dry sobs of fear. It seemed forever, though it could not have been more than a few minutes before—

Sunlight?

A single shaft of golden light on Gull’s white flanks. There she sat, waiting for me and panting happily, in a grassy clearing.

With Nyneve.

Nyneve, her russet hair and green gown reflected in honey-dark water. Nyneve, sitting by a wide stone-walled well or pool, with Gull at her feet.

In that instant I knew that they were in some sense one and the same, Gull and Nyneve. I knew it the way I knew my name was Mordred.

Nyneve had been with me all the time—but also elsewhere.

All this I knew and saw in a heartbeat before my idiot horse, galloping out of control, tried to run me into Nyneve’s lap. I hauled on the reins and screamed but could not stop him. But Nyneve rose and laid one white hand on his head as he thundered up to her, and he stopped as still as a cloud, his halt so sudden that I nearly toppled off him. I am not sure how I got to the ground. I think Nyneve reached to catch me, but I remember only standing and clinging to her, hiding my face against her chest, trying not to cry for pity of myself—I, Mordred, so cursed my own father had tried to kill me—with her arms around me and Gull fawning at my feet.