“Yes. That is why I am here.” She turned her horse, and at a gentle walk we rode toward Camelot. Pelleas rode at my other side, and I did not know what to say to him. I glanced at him, and he smiled at me. His eyes were kind.

“Court bores me, usually,” Nyneve added.

Gull frisked ahead of us, nine years old but still as playful as a puppy. The white falcon swooped low over her, and my heart beat like wings as I watched—it did so every time I saw a falcon fly. Thought is not as swift. Falcons whip through the air, their pointed wings blur with speed, they scorn slow game such as hares, they prey on songbirds on the wing. They scud high and drop like stones, like thunderbolts, they strike so hard that a dove becomes a puff of feathers floating to the earth like snow. Pelleas’s falcon was small and probably fed mostly on sparrows, but if she wanted to, she could kill birds twice her size.

With her pointed tail spread handsomely, the white falcon swooped over Gull, and Gull leaped, her long ears flying, as if she wanted to join it.

I felt the prickle of an uncanny knowing in my bones. “Both of them,” I whispered. They were both Nyneve; I knew it quite surely, but I did not know how to say it or whether I should.

“Yes,” said Nyneve as placidly as if we spoke of the weather, “in them I stay with you, and with Pelleas, even when I must be away from you.”

“You are honored, Mordred.” Pelleas spoke to me for the first time, his voice deep and warm.

“But—are there—no others?” My thoughts veered to the white stag I had seen leaping for its life in the Forest Perilous, with the black hounds scudding at its heels.

Nyneve laughed her golden laugh again. “Have mercy, Mordred! How much do you think I can do?”

“No others,” Pelleas told me. “Just the brachet for you. And the falcon for me.”

“Then I am indeed honored.”

I was not to meet King Arthur that day. He had gone somewhere by himself, Nyneve said. Always on May Day he went off by himself and returned late and somber. Wait a day, she advised.

“Does he know I am here?”

“He knew you were on the way.”

“You told him?”

“Yes.”