Yes, it was a good catch. We had fish chowder for supper. I stayed with them that night, sleeping on their dirt floor near their warm hearth, and I stayed the next day, riding along with them as they took their salted herring to market, and they grew easier with me. They did not call me Tad, of course, they could not, but neither did they call me Mordred. Nor did they my-lord me. They called me nothing. It felt good to be nothing. I stayed the next day as well.

That night, late, after Kip was asleep, Fisherfather settled himself on his three-legged stool by the hut’s frugal fire and began to speak of Fishermother. “If we had not meddled in the affairs of nobles,” he said, “Bess would still be alive.”

Bess. So that was her name. I had never known it.

“That sorceress friend of yours put a curse on her, so she did.” Fisherfather said this with a sodden, crusty anger that bore me no grudge. They learn to accept all things, these common folk.

I could not think that Nyneve would have done such a thing. Yet I had heard myself the ringing of the bluebells. Did they doom her? Or did they merely foretell?

Night wrapped around the hut like a black wool blanket, like Fishermother’s arms. A quiet night—I heard only the sounds of soft breathing: Gull, Kip, the broad sleeping breast of the sea. The silence of the night by the warm dim hearth fire made me able to ask a question I could not even think before.

“When you found me,” I said, “when you found the coracle—were there other babies in it?”

Silence. A long moment of silence before he answered as quietly as I had asked.

“Ay. Many. All dead but you.”

Silence again. My fisherfather leaned forward and with a crooked stick he stirred the fire, sending up a flicker of light.

“The wee bodies lay in the boat like so many pollack,” he said. “I’ll never forget. Many was the night I lost my sleep for thinking of it.”

I sat thinking bitterly of the stories my fishermother had told me. I, Tad, the gift of Lyr, her miracle.

“Bess didn’t know about the others,” my fisherfather said. “I didn’t tell her. It would have broken her heart entirely.”

I began to understand. “You pushed that coracle back into the sea yourself.”

“Ay.”

Thanks to his kindness, my fishermother had believed her stories, it seemed. But her believing seemed not to make them any less lies. Gift of Lyr? No. She loved me because—because she did not know who I was. I, Mordred. King Arthur’s accursed son.

Good King Arthur. Flower of kings, jewel of kings, prince of kings—and murderer. A murderer of babies.

I had looked into his face trying to see something of myself there. I had longed to be more like him.