“So he tried to kill me,” I whispered.

“Merlin advised it. Arthur asked him what he should do, and Merlin . . .”

But I did not hear, for I was staring at the dark pool again, and in it I saw the gray walls of Lothian and the barley growing green and the King’s emissaries riding, riding away with the infant between them—the little one lying on a shield, for not one of them wished to take the baby into his arms. I, Mordred, crying on that cold bed.

“. . . you survived,” said Nyneve.

I turned away from the pool and shouted at her, “I hate him!” My own passion stood me on my feet. “I hate King Arthur.”

“That is spoken as a child,” she said, not rising, not even angry, as if it were a small and passing matter that I hated my father. “You will grow to be a man and you will see what it is to be King Arthur. You will see why he acted as he did.”

But I remembered what Morgan le Fay had said, that Nyneve was in love with him. And the hot stinging feeling filled my chest, for she had called me a child, and the fact that it was true did not make it burn any the less. I glowered at her. “I will hate him always!”

She did not lift her hands, but her scrutiny lay on me like her white hands on my shoulders. Levelly she asked me, “Do you wish to kill him?”

It was as if she had reached into me with her golden dagger and opened up my soul. I felt myself swaying where I stood, I wanted to scream, I wanted to shout at her like a child that I hated her too, but it was not true, and looking into her eyes, dark and deep as deepest water, I could speak to her only starkest truth. And that truth was: no. No, I did not want to kill this King I had never met. I did not want to kill anyone, and I did not want to be this Mordred, this fated doomster, I did not wish any of this. I wanted only to be—a person I barely remembered. Tad.

“No,” I said, my voice as quiet now as hers. “I do not wish to be a murderer.”

She gifted me with her tender smile. “Mordred,” she said—her tone making the name an honorable one, a noble one—“good. I knew that I could hope for good from you. No child is born evil.”