I gazed upon her, seeing with my heart how the sunlight rippled on her russet hair, remembering that the bards said that Merlin had followed her like a dog. The sun warmed my shoulders, yet I shivered in the shadow of her power.

“Can you see the future?” I asked abruptly.

“No.”

“If you had ladywater to scry in?”

“No. I cannot prophesy. That is the one power Merlin could not teach me.”

Though I did not like to think that she would lie to me, I did not entirely believe her. Or, if I believed her, was she saying then that Merlin had been a true prophet?

And if Merlin was a prophet, then—then it would be as Merlin had said, I would—kill—

“I am heartsick, Mordred,” Nyneve said softly, looking at the water, not at me, as she spoke. “I am going home. Perhaps not even my Lady can comfort me, but I am going home to Avalon.”

I said nothing, knowing that I would be like a pennon blowing in the wind without her.

Yet—yet it might be better if I depended less on her advice. Folk looked down on a man who listened too much to a woman.

“Journey well,” I said finally, speaking just as softly as she did.

“Yes.” She rose from the grass. “Thank you, Mordred.”

I struggled up, my sense of doom riding heavy in me. “Before you go—can you truly not see my path, Nyneve? Can you not tell me what is to become of me?”

She gave me a look as hard and straight as a sword. “It is up to you, Mordred, what will become of you.”

“Have a whack at him, Mordred!” Gawain cried.

He and Garet had done just as they had said they would. They had overpowered Pellinore, stripped him of his armor, slapped his face to shame him, and tied him to an oak in the Forest Perilous as I, their squire, held the horses. Now they were killing him in painful ways. And Gawain was offering me a turn.

“Go ahead!” He thrust at me the pommel of his bloodied sword.

I shook my head. I could not look at him.

“What,” Garet put in, “you don’t like this game?”

Gawain complained, “Be a man, Mordred!”

That lout Pellinore was a man, I will give him that. He had not begged, he would not speak except to curse, and he had not yet cried out. Tied to the tree, bleeding, he stood with his head up, glaring like a wild boar.

“Last chance!” Gawain persisted in wanting to share with me his bloody deed, offering me the sword, his gloved hand stained dark and wet.

“No,” I whispered. I said it again somewhat more strongly. “No. Your father was not my father.”