“Yes.” My voice came out a whisper, for it frightened me that she noticed Gull—even though Gull was just a dog, as Nyneve had made quite clear to me. Gull could not speak to me, or reason with me, or advise me as Nyneve did. Nor did Nyneve spy on me through Gull’s eyes or know what I was doing. This she swore. It was only that—in Gull, Nyneve was with me. Her warmth, her merriness, her constancy, her happiness when I was well, her sorrow when I was sad. Her soul.

“Will you walk her now? It is a lovely night. I will come with you.”

A lovely night? It was cold, silvered by moonlight and icy as a witch’s fingers, or so I felt it—I have never taken kindly to cold. But Morgan le Fay walked out bareheaded with Gull and me. The castle gate hung open day and night, such was the peace of King Arthur’s reign. Morgan le Fay and I walked past bored guards to the furzy common where Gull trotted away from us.

“Mordred,” my aunt, the sorceress, said to me—and she had dropped her cooing tone—“tell me what is going on.”

Silently I begged Gull to be quick. “I—I beg your pardon, my lady?”

“It is no secret to me that King Lothe has long since ceased to love your mother,” Morgan le Fay said, “but something more has happened between them to make her so pale. What is it? Tell me.”

Her eyes glittered even in the dark. She did not pretend to be concerned; she simply and willfully wanted to know. Yet, even though I knew I should fear her as a sorceress, her matter-of-fact tone made me able to speak to her almost as an equal.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It is because of me, I think.”

She chuckled, standing there looking hard as glass in the moonlight. “It has always been because of you, Mordred.” There was no pity in her, yet it eased me to hear her say this, to know that I was not a child for thinking so. “Because you were born and did not have the grace to die.” As Gull came scampering up to me, white like a good ghost in the dark, Morgan le Fay went on, “But something has changed, has it not?”

Gull’s sober gaze made me think of the pool in the Forest Perilous, and of Nyneve, and made me feel how far I must stay from speaking of them to my aunt, to anyone. But I had to answer something. I said, “I asked my mother to show me how to scry in a mirror.” Some instinct made me say “scry” boldly to Morgan le Fay; daring was less dangerous than cringing in front of her.