“Now go to sleep, Tad.” My fishermother patted me. She called me Tad because I had come to her naked like a wriggling little tadpole from the sea. “Oh, look, there is the mark of Lyr’s kiss!” She always made a show of discovering it, a brownish mark like an X behind my left ear. She kissed me there. “Sleep in peace.”

And so I did. The murmuring of the sea was my lullaby, and my belly was full—I never went hungry. “The haddock leap into the nets,” my fisherfather said sometimes in wonder. “Thank the goodliness of our blessed King Arthur.” For it was the soul-honor of the King that made the fish fat and plentiful. But I did not dream of Arthur, King in Camelot, not in those periwinkle days when I was Tad. The hut was warm and the sea breathed marvels in my ear, and in my sleep I dreamed sometimes that the waves rocked me in their watery arms. I did not know myself to be bad seed cast away, and I did not think to wonder who was my real father or my real mother, for my fishermother had told me that I was a gift from Lyr. The sea was my father and my mother. And in the morning there would be warm white chowder to eat, and all day I would leap on the rocks and wade the shallows and run with the plovers on the gravel shore, and the sea was vast and the sky vast all around me, and I stood a god’s gift over the sea amidst the sky, and the Forest Perilous was only a low blue mystery in the distance. And at night there would be kippered herring for supper and the warmth of Fishermother’s arms and my story at bedtime, and I was happy.

It is instructive, looking back now that I am no longer mortal, instructive and curious to remember how it was to be happy.

All changed, of course, before I was strong enough or ready, on a summer day when a lady in green came riding on a great gray horse out of the Forest Perilous.

I saw her approaching, for I was gathering birds’ eggs on the rocks, and as I squatted by the basket I glanced up and saw the horse shining like a mussel pearl against the darkness that was the forest. Speckled eggs dropped from my hands and cracked open at my feet. Crouching, I gawked at the horse and rider, for I had never seen such a thing, though I had heard of lords and ladies in the stories my fishermother told me. But to really see—it was beyond believing. A lady, a real lady, riding past our hut—

I left my basket and ran to tell my fishermother to come out and see.