At the rising of the moon I saw, riding across the sky upon a fiery horse, a giant furred man with the antlers of a great stag growing out of his forehead.

I rode past a beech tree and thwock, some outlaw’s arrow stood in it, buried almost to the feathers, buzzing.

At the roots of the greatest ash tree I had ever seen, so tall its leaves disappeared in cloud, sat an ancient crone, a comely maiden, and a slip of a girl, each with her hair in a thousand tiny plaits beneath a crown of ivy. As I rode toward them, the crone gave me a snaggletoothed smile. “Greetings, Mordred.” She spun thread, and as it passed from her crooked hands, it turned many colors. “We’re weaving your life now,” the maiden told me eagerly, and on her deft hands the thread turned to a mighty jewel-bright complication, a cat’s cradle fit to be a dragon’s nest. “Time to cut it!” the little girl cried, and she lifted a pair of shears as heavy and black as a raven’s beak. “No,” said the maiden, “just for fun, let him do it. Mordred, come, you can use your sword.” She was just a gentle maiden, but I had never felt so frightened of anyone or anything, not even the serpent-headed beast, not even the horned rider in the sky, not even the arrow out of nowhere meant to kill me. I turned my horse and galloped away.

When at last I arrived at Caer Morgana, the stronghold of my aunt Morgan le Fay, I was able to present her with a gift of two fine greyhounds.

“My nephew Mordred!” she cried when the servants showed me to her solarium, mocking her own lack of surprise to see me as I bowed before her, shabby and weary, my wounds half healed. She smiled like a cat, perhaps thinking that I was doubly her nephew. “And what are these?” The graceful gazehounds had come in with me.

“For you, my lady.”

“A perfect brace! My thanks. Take them to the kennel,” she told the servants, “and this brachet with them.”

“No,” I said, “Gull stays with me.”

She rolled her eyes, but permitted it. She wished to befriend me, then, at least at the start. Good. The servants showed me to a lofty chamber with cages of linnets and partridges hanging from the vaulted ceiling, with mullioned windows glassed in many colors as bright as flowers. They brought me a warm, petal-strewn bath and new clothing—a fine white cambric undertunic, a red velvet tunic, a tabard of golden damask. When I was robed, a maidservant brought perfumed balm for my wounds. By the time I went down for dinner I felt almost safe in Caer Morgana.