Now that I did not mean to anger him, yet I saw him flush and scowl. “No one owns her to give her to me or anyone.”

The falcon moved, pressing warm against the side of his head. Nyneve touched his hand.

“I beg pardon,” I said.

“No harm,” Nyneve told me. “You speak no more ignorantly than most men. King Lothe, for instance. Or that ruffian Sir Outelake.”

It was not a name I had heard before. “Sir Outelake?”

Sir Pelleas sat back, and Nyneve told me her story.

It began as one of Merlin’s tricks—though Nyneve did not know Merlin then. Fostered by the Lady of the Lake, she was fourteen years old, barely a woman, when Merlin laid his mischief on her. Perhaps he sensed a rival in her, though she did not yet know her own power. Or perhaps his own strange fate made him do it. For whatever reason, he chose her from afar to be his victim.

“I was riding a little nodding donkey of a palfrey,” Nyneve said, “when I heard a baying like the hounds of the horned god of the dead, and here came the white stag running for its life with thirty pairs of black hounds yelping close behind it. And my white brachet—it should never have happened, but she ran away from me to hunt it with them.”

Nyneve knew that I would understand: The brachet was she, herself, being cozened against her will. Merlin had stolen her soul and turned it into a beast that hunted blood. She galloped in pursuit, running her little palfrey wild with fright through the Forest Perilous, and the hunt swept her straight to Camelot and right into the great hall where young King Arthur sat feasting with his knights. She saw him watch openmouthed as the white stag leaped the table before him. She saw her ensorcelled brachet tear at the stag, opening a bloody wound. She saw a knight take the brachet and run away with it as the stag doubled back and darted out the door.

Sobbing, she cried out to the King, “Summon the knight who has stolen my brachet!”

But then, as Merlin smirked beside the astounded King on the dais, a fully armed knight rode into the great hall and seized her.

“He carried me off and paid no heed to my screaming,” Nyneve said. “To him I was nothing more than a haunch of meat he fancied, not yet dead.”

The knight was Sir Outelake. He carried her away and made it clear to her that she was his chattel, his property, just as if she were his horse or his cow, and he would have done to her what he liked except that King Arthur sent one of his knights after her.

“Was that you?” I asked Pelleas.