“You must trust me,” she said, her voice even softer. “I am one who hopes for good from you.” She paused while I listened to the clashing of the horse’s hooves and my own harsh breathing. Then almost in a whisper she said, “Perhaps the only one.”

That night we camped in the Forest Perilous.

We rode until dark amid the twisted wych elms, the looming oaks heavy with druid vine, the black hemlocks. Up until the moment Nyneve’s great gray steed carried me into the Forest Perilous, I had thought the world was made of sunshine and cloud sheen and open sky and open sea; where I lived—or where I used to live—trees grew not at all, but here they grew so thickly and so tall, oak, beech, rowan, hazel, that I could not see the sky. Something crashed away between the trees. Something cried out. Mazy trails led in all directions like tunnels, and within three strides I did not know where I was. That was the day the world closed in on me, dim and glass-green and labyrinthine, and—though I did not know it then—it was the world in which I would ride for the rest of my life. The Forest Perilous cloaked the kingdom from its stony northern shoulders down to Camelot and the sea, mantling it in shadow.

Even as a bare-legged child I wanted to be brave and good, so I shivered but said nothing. In silence I rode where Nyneve and her courser carried me.

Dim yellow sundown turned to gray twilight. In the hemlocks someone laughed. We rode on.

Twilight turned to nightfall. Swaying in some wind I couldn’t even feel, a tall elm groaned like a human. Perhaps it had been something not human that had laughed also. Or perhaps an outlaw. A dead branch thudded to the ground just behind us; the horse leaped forward. Somewhere a bird barked once, then was silent. Some tendril I could not see brushed my face. I pressed against Nyneve’s chest, trembling.

Nyneve stretched out one hand, and in her palm grew a flame to light the night. She held it there, yellow like a baby chick nesting in the cup of her hand, and she said, “Let us find a place to stop.”