In a moment I stood before the hut, so breathless, not from running but from wonder, that I could barely speak. But Mama was already at the door, staring.

And the lady sent the horse at a long floating trot straight toward us.

So this was a lady. I did not yet know enough to find it odd that she rode alone. She sat half sideward on the horse, and her gown flowed down like leaf-green water around her feet, covering them; I thought at first that she might not have feet, she seemed so different from my stout brown fishermother standing in the hut’s low doorway. The lady’s skin lustered as smooth and pale as moonlight. Her hair the color of a red hawk lay in sleek parted wings over her ears, then swept into plaits bound with crisscross ribbons of the same green as her shimmering gown, ending in clasps of gold. The plaits hung so long they lay like whiplashes against the horse’s flanks, making it snort as it trotted toward us, a great dapple-gray horse—any horse would have seemed huge to me, for I had never seen one, but in truth this was a courser, a charger with massive shoulders and a mighty arched neck, a destrier, not a lady’s gentle palfrey. My nose scarcely reached higher than the horse’s knees as it halted before me.

There I stood in my coarse brown tunic, bare-legged, a child with a mouth like an O, agape at the sight of the lady upon the great gray horse, gazing up at her face—at her skin like moonlight, her eyes dark and secret, like deep pools at midnight—I looked up at her, and she looked back at me and smiled, a merry, tender smile, as if we shared a jest.

“Well met, Mordred,” she said.

My fishermother wept even though Nyneve gave her a purse of gold.

That was the lady’s name, Nyneve, and she was a sorceress. The snorting charger stood as still as the dapple-gray moon in the sky when she alighted and touched it on the forehead. She touched my fishermother’s rough hair and said, “It is not so bad. I feel life in you; you are with child again. You will have a fine son and miss this one the less.”

I did not yet understand. Nor did I understand how or why she called me Mordred, though I sensed at once that it was truly my name. Looking into Nyneve’s eyes as she said it, I had recognized the name the way I recognized sharp flints under my bare feet.

“But why not leave the child here?” my fishermother cried. “They cast him away, they do not want him. No one has to know.”

“But I know,” Nyneve said. “And if I discovered him, so can Morgan le Fay.”