I felt so shaken that I had to sit down again by the pool. I felt drawn to look at the dark water once more but I resisted, looking instead at the massive trees all around me, up, up, to where there should have been sky—but the trees rose so high and so thick that instead of a sweep of sunlit blue, instead of the vast sky of the seaside that used to cup me like a god’s hand, I could see only a dim and distant circle, like a dusty window in a tower.

4

SHOW ME KING ARTHUR,” I DEMANDED OF THE POOL.

The sleek water merely shimmered, a few yellow leaves floating on its black surface. It had taken me until autumn to gather courage to go back to that place—and not for fear of punishment, either. When I had ridden home to Lothian on King Lothe’s second-best war horse, last time, he had met me with his harsh, angry laugh, that was all. “So you know, Mordred,” he had bellowed, and he had laughed again. It was as if he considered the knowledge punishment enough. Since then, whenever he saw me, he barked out his raven laugh and turned away. Garet went about sullen and wary and let me alone. My lady mother, Queen Morgause, drifted through the castle like a wimpled ghost and would not look at me. Things were even worse for her now, I judged. For me they were both better and worse.

Better, because folk gave me a certain distance, almost respect.

Worse, because I carried my fated name all alone, and it was a heavy name for a boy not yet twelve years old to bear.

“I am Mordred,” I said to the pool. “Show me my father. Show me King Arthur.”

The Forest Perilous loomed around me, and the glinting water showed back to me only my own narrow young face. The pool lay all surface, like tarnished silver, not letting me in, its skin so still and taut that I could see the dimples where the floating leaves rested. I sighed and sat down on the pool’s stony verge, and Gull settled at my feet as if this might take a while.

As my pony cropped the tough autumn grass, I tried to think how it had been before, this scrying. Had it required waiting? Patience? Or was I perhaps being too calm? The last time, my mind had been in a daze as Nyneve talked, so that I remembered the visions as sharply as if they were made of glittering sword-edged steel, and I remembered Nyneve’s words just as sharply, but only in shards:

. . . you must understand that everything about your life depends on Merlin, on whether to believe him. And what you must understand about Merlin is that he began as a prophet, but he became a mere trickster, and he ended as a fool.