Nyneve stroked my back, then cradled my head between her hands. “There, Mordred,” she murmured, and I felt the power of her touch take the angry pain out of me, or at least lessen it enough so that I could stand straight and step back and look at her. She wore her russet hair in a thick ribboned fall down her back and her green gown gathered by a belt tooled in a spiral pattern inlaid with gold. Otherwise nothing had changed.

Only—everything had changed.

“Tell me,” I begged Nyneve.

“Eat first,” she said gently. She knelt by the walled pool. “For your many blessings we thank you, my Lady,” she whispered as she gazed down into the water. Deep—I could see no bottom. Nyneve pulled up her flowing sleeve to bare her white arm, slipped her hand into the water and drew out a shining fish longer than my foot. She laid it on the grass where it gulped air painfully but did not flop. She reached in again and drew out another. Then she said, “Firewood, Mordred,” and when I brought her sticks she kindled the campfire with a single coaxing touch of her hands.

I unsaddled my horse and hobbled him, then sat by the fire with Gull at my side and watched Nyneve as she held portions of fish on sticks over the flames. “How did you get here?” I asked, for I saw neither horse nor any baggage. “Are you here always?”

“No. I hastened here by the sky ways and the watery ways.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned at the fire; I could see her deciding not to tell me. “Shhhh, Mordred. Eat.”

We ate fish and bread. I had not thought I could eat anything ever again, but I ate the fish hungrily. That was her gift to me, warm white fish, which I had not tasted since I left my fishermother.

Igraine, my grandmother—doubly my grandmother—was married to the Duke of Tintagel, by whom she had two daughters, Morgan and Morgause. But then King Uther Pendragon saw her and coveted her beauty, so he killed the Duke and seized Igraine. By Uther Pendragon, Igraine then had a son, Arthur.

So Nyneve explained to me. “It is a hard thing to be a woman, Mordred,” Nyneve told me, “and unjust.” We sat on the speckled stones, looking down into the forest pool, and her voice had gone dark and glassy and very quiet, like its water. “Remember this. It will serve you.”

I gazed at her, wondering if she had ever been seized by a man against her will. The answer, though I did not yet know it, was yes.