With Gull scampering after me, I rode into the Forest Perilous and was not afraid. I was too terrified of Morgan le Fay to be afraid of a mere lair of thieves, trolls, renegade knights, witches, nixies, seven-headed beasts, and wandering spirits of the dead.

During the next few weeks I encountered stranger things than those.

A slain knight lay in a glade with a maiden weeping over him. “Avenge my brother!” she cried to me. I said to her, “If I were to be killed, no one would avenge me.” With rainy eyes she gazed at me in pity, almost in understanding, and I knew I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

I rode past the mouth of a cave, and from the darkness within it something roared. I looked, and eight feet above the ground I saw yellow eyes blazing and a puff of purple fire. I said, “Greetings, denizen,” and rode on.

A tall knight on a huge horse barred my path and challenged me, “Sir, defend yourself.” He wore a full helm with a visor, and full armor; even his charger wore armor. He couched his lance, but I said, “A lance is an awkward thing to carry in the woodland,” and I threw mine into the bracken. He said, “Sir, you are a coward.” I said, “Sir, I am not a lunatic,” and I rode away.

In the night I heard a sound that resembled the baying of hounds, but when I pulled a flaming stick from my campfire and held it high to look, I saw a beast with a body like that of a leopard but legs and cloven feet like those of a red deer. It turned its head and hissed at me, and its head was that of a great serpent, with flat fiery eyes. I threw my torch at it, and it sprang away.

Two greyhounds leaped out of a thicket and attacked Gull. Snarling, she crouched under my horse, and I smacked the greyhounds with the flat of my sword, trying to drive them away. “How dare you smite my dogs!” a knight bellowed, charging. We fought with swords on horseback, and his heavy weapon sliced me on the arm, the head, the shoulder, then glanced off my shield and severed my horse’s neck; the steed fell to the ground, thrashing, and I fell with it. Without dismounting, the knight bore down on me, and I knew I would die, and I saw Gull and the greyhounds watching, all sitting in a row, best friends now—but another knight came galloping with couched lance, and he swept the attacker over the tail of his horse and leaped down and dragged off his helm and beheaded him. “Take this scoundrel’s horse,” he told me. “Now you’re a blooded knight, Sir Mordred,” and he rode away; he was Sir Lancelot.

Every night I heard the wolves wailing.