Only the table and his own drunkenness kept Gawain from lunging at me. “Fair?” His flushed face jutted toward mine like a gargoyle. “Fair fight, to wear our father’s head as a trophy?” It had fallen to me to go to Pellinore and see if I could get Lothe’s head back, for burial, but he had already fed it to the kennel dogs, he said. A paragon of chivalry, Pellinore. “I plan to haul him from the horse and tie him to a tree—”

I did not want to hear this. “But that’s murder.”

“Murder?” Gawain surprised me; he leaned back and began to laugh. “Why, we’ll all be murderers together, then. Show me someone in this world who is not a murderer. I’m a murderer, our mother, Morgause, is a murderer, our aunt Morgan is a murderer, our uncle King Arthur—”

“Gawain!” Garet protested.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“You don’t believe me? What else do you call it when he kills thirty-nine others trying to kill you?”

“Gawain!” Garet stood to hush him. I, also, got up, not knowing where I was going. I stood there, my heart stuttering like my mouth. “Wh-wh-what?”

“Babies,” Gawain snarled. I could not tell what he was saying, whether our mother, Morgause, had killed babies—which she might have, I had sometimes wondered, our baby sisters all dead—or whether he was calling Garet and me babies, or—I was not sure he had said what I thought I had heard; he had said something of King Arthur—

“Gawain,” Garet warned, “speak no more, not a single word.”

Gawain did not obey, of course. “And your precious Nyneve,” he barked at me, blurring the words, “she’s a murderer too.”

He was drunk. Not worth answering. I turned my back on him and walked out of our chamber.