She went on. Arthur, she said, was taken away from Igraine soon after he was born and did not know she was his mother until after he became King. Even then, he still did not know that he had half sisters. Or if anyone told him, perhaps he did not remember or take heed. He was a boy, fifteen years old, trying to prove that he was a man and the rightful Liege King. When a fair young woman, Queen Morgause of Lothian, came to Camelot, Arthur behaved as might have befitted a king of druid times.

“It is a hard thing to be a woman,” I echoed Nyneve sardonically, for I, also, was trying to be a man. There I sat, eleven years old and bewildered in a wilderness, looking down into deep, dark water and not knowing half of what it meant when a man took a woman to his bed. Yes, I understood begetting. I had seen the stallions mount, had watched the mares grow round, had seen the foals born. But there was too much about human begetting that I did not yet comprehend, could not yet comprehend.

“Yes, it is,” Nyneve said, keeping her voice gentle. I am sure she had wanted to wait until I was older to tell me these things. “Think of Morgause. Think of what it was like for her.”

I did not think of Morgause. My thoughts were more strange as I gazed into the seemingly bottomless water. I imagined that the pool went down through the earth, ran under the Forest Perilous and joined with other waters as far away as Avalon. It seemed to me as if anything could come out of there. As Nyneve spoke, I stared at the dark water, all sheen and shadows moving—

And then I stiffened with the eeriness of what I saw. In the water. As if watching a dream, yet—I sat stark awake, and I had never seen anything in a dream so plainly as I saw Morgause, young and beautiful in a blue velvet mantle, riding a white palfrey, a golden coronet on her dark head and fear in her dark eyes, riding home from Camelot. As I watched, she stroked her palfrey’s mane, and golden ribbons appeared there, winding themselves into the white hair.

She had been—like Nyneve?

What had happened?

I blinked, and Morgause was gone, and Nyneve sat there in the sunshine, talking. “. . . Merlin laid a fate upon Arthur,” she was saying, “that because he had bedded his sister, his kingdom would fall to the son she bore him, and he would die at that son’s hands in battle. And the child’s name would be Mordred.”

I. Mordred.

Nyneve looked into my face. “It is not a bad name. It means ‘courageous counselor.’ There is nothing evil in your name.”

She was wrong. I heard dread in my name.

I, Mordred. Arthur’s son. Fated to kill him.