“Partly, yes. Partly, it was for expediency. I needed to have him and his sons for me, not against me.” King Arthur’s gaze turned bleak, and looking up at him, I thought of what I should have asked Nyneve before she left: the meaning of the white stag leaping for life in the Forest Perilous, the black hounds always at its heels.

King Arthur said softly, “Mordred, there’s small freedom in being a King. Most often a King does not what he wishes, but what he must.”

Often in the days that followed I wondered: Did King Arthur wish to make me his knight? Or was he merely doing what he must?

Thoughts like those sliced like sword cuts. For hours every day I wore myself out smiting foes made of straw in the exercise yard, but I still could not sleep at night.

Worthiness . . .

I had none. All I had was my adoration and my shameful, hidden hatred. That black hatred—I began to know why it stayed with me; it was my fate at work. In me. And I could tell myself and tell myself that a prophecy was a lie, as Nyneve had said, a bogey made of nothing but words, an echo in the wind—yet my body knew the power of prophecy. I could feel the fate pulsing dark in my blood as I tried to sleep; I could feel it lying heavy in my stomach as I tried to eat; I could feel it in me like a black marrow in my bones.

How could I serve King Arthur as his knight? I wanted to go away, I wanted to do what was right, yet I stayed as if skewered on the sword of his goodliness.

Those nights for the first time I thought of killing myself, and the thought frightened me so badly that I walked through my days trembling.

Or perhaps I shook from lack of sleep. Or perhaps because I had not been eating. The world began to look bright and strange to me. Without meaning to, I became like a young druid undergoing a vigil, waiting for a vision.

It came to me as I lay in my bed on the last night before the ceremony of knighthood.