“Why, Mordred!” She laughed, much diverted. “Scrying is for women, don’t you know that? She would not show you, would she?” My silence answered her. “I thought not.” She laughed anew. “What do you want to find out, Mordred? What did you want to see?”

Because her laughter stiffened my spine, I answered boldly again. “I want to see my father. King Arthur.”

She laughed again, but this time low and dark. I shivered, remembering the dark voices of the black hounds in the night of the Forest Perilous. She stood regarding me with glinting interest.

“I will teach you how to scry,” she said, and something had put teeth in her tone.

She asked no more questions of me. I think that by saying my father’s name I had answered all her questions. Or else she saw more to be gained.

“Come,” she said with hard-edged sweetness, “is your bitch quite finished? Let us go within.”

She took me to her chamber—I barely recognized the place as Lothian, for it seemed that Morgan le Fay journeyed nowhere without a great many draperies; tapestries hung everywhere, masking the stone. I stared at them, at twisted beasts stitched in thread of gold, but Morgan le Fay brushed past them and ordered her maidservant to find her a mirror. The girl brought her a circle of polished metal from her baggage—bronze, or perhaps brass. I had thought that Morgan le Fay would have a silver mirror with a tooled border, like Queen Morgause. Perhaps this one was her second best, for traveling. She took it by its handle from the maid, sent her out of the room with a gesture and closed the door.

“Your mother,” she said to me with a quirk in her voice, “was afraid that you would see the seduction.”

She blew out the candles, then placed the mirror on the floor, where it lay like a small pool, shimmering in the moonlight that sifted into the room through the high, narrow windows.

“A moonless night would be better,” Morgan le Fay said. “But it is dark enough.” She settled herself on the bed—the ropes creaked under her weight, and the canopy shifted. “Sit on the floor, Mordred, and look slantwise in the mirror. Think of what you desire to see and let the desire fill you. Then be still and gaze without blinking until you see nothing that is in this room.”