No. I lie. I do not like to say truly what my feelings were: love and hatred. I did not care to use those words then—but how I loved him, my great-hearted King, because he smiled on me, and how I hated him because he would do anything for me, anything, except embrace me as his son.

“I am sorry about this ugliness with Pellinore, Mordred,” he said, looking not at me but at Gull. “First you lose your father—”

“He was not my father.” Sudden anger jolted my spine as straight as a lance, and the words were out, hard and strong, before I could fear them. Hard and level I was glaring into my liege King Arthur’s eyes.

Then my heart stopped. I stopped breathing. He had to know what I was thinking. Would he call the guards and have them take me away, or would he—would he say it?

Neither. He met my stare for a hollow moment, and then his gray gaze shifted. He looked down, he almost seemed to redden. My heart started beating again, and aching, for I wanted never to see King Arthur ashamed.

“Your foster father, I mean,” he said quietly. “King Lothe. I am sorry.”

“King Lothe meant nothing to me but a beating from time to time.” How could I be so calm, so cold?

In the straw Gull sprawled, snoring, soft bellied, one ear flopped the wrong direction and turned inside out so that its pink innards showed. King Arthur and I sat and studied her as if we had never seen a brachet before.

“But I, also, am sorry,” I said, my voice low. I was not speaking of King Lothe.

“Yes. Well, this trouble . . .” King Arthur stirred almost painfully on his throne of straw. “I have told your brothers that a man of courage and sense chooses his own fight. I have also told them that it is time we provided you with horse and arms.” He gave me a level look. “Will you serve me, Mordred, as a knight of the Round Table?”

“But . . . but my liege!” Now I was the one astonished and hot with shame. I stammered, “You . . . you would knight me? I will be greatly honored, but . . . I have done nothing to make me worthy.”

He did not smile at my emotion. I will cherish him always because he did not smile. He said, “Sometimes worthiness comes afterward.”

“I . . . I hope so.”

King Arthur said quietly, “And sometimes it does not. Remember, Pellinore was a knight of mine.”

It was a quelling thought—yet it comforted me that he said it, that we could speak of it. It had troubled me, sometimes, to think that Pellinore had been a Knight of the Round Table.

“Is that why you took him to you, then?” I asked. “In hopes that he might become worthy?”