“Indeed, yes, she has put off her wimple. Now she wears her hair in a jeweled caul of gold.” Morgan le Fay waited while a servant brought in the meat—squab, rabbit pie, roast suckling pork—then added, seemingly as an afterthought, “Your brothers will murder her, of course. They will kill either her, or young Lamorak, or both.”

I sat once more struggling for breath, partly because Morgan le Fay could speak so coolly of her sister’s death while reaching for the rabbit pie, but mostly because—

I managed to speak. “You know the future?”

She gave me a glance as offhand as fate. Her eyes were brown, I noticed, dark—I was startled by the depth of their darkness in her round, powdered face. She said merely, “Sometimes.”

“You are a seeress.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes I see the workings of fate. Sometimes not. Eat your squab, Mordred, before it gets cold.”

I did not eat my squab. I said, “In the Forest Perilous, I met three strange personages beneath an ash tree as big as the world.” I told her of the three witches tending the brightly colored thread, the venerable crone and the maiden and the small girl with the shears.

Morgan’s eyes grew round. “You’re honored, Mordred.” She regarded me with a sort of respect. “You are quite a personage, it seems. And you have the gift of scrying, yet. What a pity you were not born female. You would have made a mighty sorceress.”

I shrugged. I had tried no scrying since I had learned it was the magic of ladies and matrons, those who have no power but to know secrets. Folk called me a coward; I did not want them calling me a woman.

“The one who cradled the thread invited me to draw my sword and cut it,” I said. “I should have done so. I could have chosen for myself a long, long life.”

Morgan le Fay shook her head. “Had you drawn your sword, you would have severed the thread in the exact same place as if it were cut by the heedless little girl.”

I stared. “How can you say that?”

“Because that is the way fate works.”