It led into my chamber, of course.

I stepped into the—chamber, illusion, whatever it might be—and closed the door behind me. I no longer cared that it could not be real. I tested the walls with my hand; the stone felt solid. I opened one of the mullioned windows and looked out. Where there should have been a corridor I saw the view from my tower chamber, a hundred feet of steep stone and then the chasm and the fierce river foaming white over hidden boulders. I closed the window and pounded the bed with my fist. I hated this room now, hated it, this fine lofty bedchamber that had once seemed so welcoming to me. Overhead in their cages the linnets and partridges were singing. How could they sing? They were prisoners, trapped as surely as I was. I seized the basin from the washstand and hurled it through a window, shattering the glass. Anger helped. I stood on the bed and reached up, and then I piled pillows on the bed and stood on them and tried again, trying to pull down the cages and release the birds so that they, at least, could fly out the window and be free. But I could not reach them.

I stumbled off the bed and dropped to my knees on the floor beside Gull. I took her head between my faltering hands. Her brown eyes looked back at me gravely.

“Nyneve,” I whispered to Gull’s eyes, “help me.”

Time passed. Maybe a few moments, maybe a few hours. I do not know. I gazed without blinking into Gull’s sober brown eyes, and Gull sat as still as ladywater with her head between my hands, gazing back at me.

“Nyneve. Please, help.”

She was far away, as far from me as Pelleas had quested far from her. But slowly I reached her. I saw the shadowy green water first, and then the lilies floating on the still surface, yellow, creamy white. And then Nyneve, sitting alone and pensive in a vine-clad arbor half veiled by willows on the island shore.

“Nyneve!” I cried.

She turned, startled, and her sweet voice sounded inside my head. Mordred?

I was not close enough to see her face. Even so, my throat closed; I could not speak.

Mordred? Is something wrong? What is it?

I made myself speak. “Trapped in Caer Morgana,” I whispered.

I see. She did see me now, somehow. I have never understood how Nyneve scried in air, but somehow she had drawn me closer. I could see her face—thinner since I had seen her last, too thin—and I watched as her wise eyes studied my despair, and considered it, and made a decision. Follow Gull, she said.

“Gull is as frightened as I am.”