He shook his head. “No,” Nyneve said with a quirk in her voice, “I met Pelleas later. No, I am grateful to Arthur, but I was in almost as much danger from the knight he sent as I was with Outelake. It was Pellinore.”

I did not then understand about Sir Pellinore, and Nyneve did not tell me. She went on to explain that Pellinore fought Outelake, not because Outelake had seized her against her will, but because Outelake claimed he had taken her by force of arms and Pellinore knew that he had not. Also because Outelake angered him by killing his horse. Fighting afoot, Pellinore killed Outelake with a single blow.

“He took me straight back to Camelot because Arthur had told him to do so,” Nyneve said. “That, I think, was the only reason. And King Arthur restored my brachet to me. It is for his good heart that I love him. And that day I swore to myself that I would learn sorcery, and that I would never be owned by any man.”

I heard voices and laughter outside and stood to look down on the courtyard from the tower window. Through the great white arch of the castle gate, the nobles who had gone a-Maying were returning, their heads garlanded with primrose and buttercups, daisies twined in their horses’ manes. I would have liked to have gone a-Maying with some damsel as fair as Nyneve.

“When I met Pelleas,” said Nyneve more softly, “I saw that he knew how to love a woman truly.”

The horses were all frivolous colors—piebald, trout-speckled gray, star-spotted, blue roan, strawberry dun; I saw a golden chestnut with a silver tail and mane. I looked at the horses, the flowers, the noble knights and ladies, not at Pelleas and Nyneve. After a moment Nyneve rose and came to stand by my side, looking out of the window with me. “The tall damsel in the purple mantle,” she said, “is Queen Guinevere.”

I looked again and saw her golden crown almost hidden under the masses of cowslip and columbine in her honey-brown hair. Guinevere was plain-faced, but regal, and graceful in all her movements, and everything about her made me think of honey; she had a golden sheen of sweetness.

I saw her smile and lean close to a tall knight who followed by her side, her lips at his ear, whispering to him, and I asked Nyneve, “The one with her—that is not King Arthur?”

Nyneve often laughed at me, as I have said—though never when it would have hurt me—but she did not laugh now. She said merely, “No. That is Sir Lancelot.”

I gazed down on Queen Guinevere and wondered why she did not bear sons for King Arthur, and why he did not put her away from him and take another. And I wondered where he was.