The servants brought bowls of strawberries, but for once Morgan le Fay seemed uninterested in eating. She leaned toward me in the candlelight and told me a story. There was once a knight, she said, and the king, his liege, had gifted him royally with a goblet fit for a prince, a great heavy vessel of pure gold. But when his lady saw the goblet, she turned white as a lily. Throw it in the river, she said. Bury it, burn it, put it away from you. It is your death. But the knight would not give up the king’s gift. So as he slept, his lady crept out of their bedchamber and stole the goblet and hid it until she could think how to destroy it. When the knight awoke in the morning and saw that the goblet was gone, he was mightily enraged. Where have you put it? he roared at his lady. And when she would not answer him, he struck her so hard that she stumbled and fell against a doorway. And the goblet, which she had placed in a high niche above the doorway, fell down upon the knight’s head, killing him.

“You see,” said Morgan le Fay, “by trying to prevent fate, the lady actually aided it.”

“Still,” I said, “the knight could have chosen not to keep the goblet or strike the lady.” It was late. Under the table Gull slept. The candles had burned down and were trickling runnels of wax at first limpid like tears but then like cream and then flat white like the blind harper’s eyes. I felt the wine buzzing in my head like bumblebees, like arrows shot to try to kill me, and in a kind of trance I watched the candles dripping.

“He could have,” said Morgan le Fay, “but then his fate would have found him in a different way.”

“But if that is so, then what is the use of even trying to do right?”

“What, indeed?” She leaned toward me with glittering eyes. “I will tell you another tale to show you the power of fate,” she said. “Once there was a King who was seduced into fathering a baby by his own sister. And he knew that he was fated to be killed by this unnatural son. So he took all the boy babies in the kingdom, forty boy babies in all, and he put them all in a boat and gave them to the sea. And all those babies starved or died of cold or were drowned—except one.”

“Me,” I said. I spoke without raising my eyes from the tears of the candles, but my heart was pounding.

“And the one who survived was his son, who was destined to destroy him,” said Morgan le Fay. “Do you see? There is no escaping the working of fate.”