It was a place less a stronghold than a pleasure palace. The courtyards spread wide, and the halls also, not stony and cramped like the halls of Lothian or even Camelot. Many windows let in the light. From my tower chamber I could see a river rushing in a deep ravine, and this seemed to be all that set apart Caer Morgana from the Forest Perilous; I saw no moat. Morgan le Fay had her own ways of defending herself and her lands, as I came to understand.

We dined in her bedchamber, instead of in the common room. Servants had placed a table between the windows, and brought in wine and sweet breads for just the two of us.

“Is this the way to dine,” I tried to joke, “when you are a great lady with no husband?”

She smiled. “Is it not more pleasant here than in a smoky, drafty hall?”

Indeed it was, with the tapestries hanging lush around us and scented rushes lying deep on the floor and beeswax candles for light. And the lady—in the candle glow I could almost forget she was my aunt Morgan le Fay and think of her just as a lady—the lady was pleasant to look at, gowned in the Byzantine fashion, draped in scarves, with her hair lifted by gold wire into a complication as dense as that dragon’s nest I had seen in the Forest Perilous.

“Aside from that,” Morgan added, “I would like to be able to speak frankly to you, with no one listening from the shadows.”

I remembered how I had eavesdropped as a child in Lothian and smiled. “Of what shall we speak so frankly?” I asked, for I wished to know what was her game, as King Lothe would have put it.

“Why, gossip, of course. Did you know that your mother has taken a lover?”

I did not, and the idea of my mother as some knight’s lady love took my breath away. Her lover was Sir Lamorak, my aunt said, son of that old rogue Pellinore, now dead.

“But—but why?” I blurted like a child. “Did he seduce her?” I felt that he might have done so as a way of avenging his father.

Morgan le Fay lifted her goblet of wine in her plump hand and laughed at me heartily. “No, I think not,” she said when she could speak. “More likely the reverse. Morgause has always liked her men young and royal.” She winked at me.

She was saying—she was saying that Morgause had seduced King Arthur? But then he was not so much to blame, and Morgause could have showed me more of the warmth of a mother, I thought, feeling my heart congeal into anger. Once I had pitied her, but not anymore.

“She has put off her wimple, then?” I tried to match my aunt Morgan’s light tone, and perhaps I succeeded. She laughed.