There had been no hint of blame in what she said, yet I felt keenly to blame.

“I cannot think he is dead,” Nyneve said almost in a whisper. “I do not think he is dead.” Her voice grew stronger. “I would know if he were dead. I would feel it.”

“You—perhaps he sensed . . .” I stumbled over this, it was all so strange to me. “You were in danger, helping me . . . .”

“He sent the falcon back to me? Perhaps.” I could tell she did not think so. She looked away from me, far away, as her fingers stroked the bird’s shoulder. “She flew far; she was very worn and tired. She is stronger now, and each day she flies out longer. Soon I will send her looking for him.”

“You cannot see . . .”

“Scrying?” She shook her head. “No, I can see nothing. Do you know what I think, Mordred?” I could scarcely believe it, how her warm voice greeted me as an old friend, how her warm glance embraced me. “I think he has fulfilled his quest. I think that he has found the Grail, and finding it has transported him so far from here that he does not remember me.”

Let her think what she chose if it helped her. “But he will return,” I said.

“I think so. Yes.”

“I dreamed of him finding the Grail!” Suddenly I remembered. “Before I left Camelot.”

I told her of my vision in which Pelleas had laid his naked sword across the throats of the two sleepers, Gawain and the maiden. Nyneve smiled with wonder. “But that happened long ago!” Pelleas had been in love with the maiden, but she scorned him, and Gawain had offered to persuade her on Pelleas’s behalf. Then he had seduced her for himself. Pelleas had spared his life and hers, but he had never forgiven him. “It was how we met,” Nyneve said softly. Pelleas had been ready to kill himself when Nyneve had taken away his pain with her magical hands.

Nyneve’s smile rippled away, and she stared at me. “But you say that in your vision he found the Grail?”

“A cauldron of blood.”

“What is the matter?” she asked me. I suppose my face had changed.

So much blood. Too much blood in a man. “Nyneve,” I questioned her abruptly, “what is the meaning of the white stag that flees and flees with the black hounds panting always at its heels?”

A few heartbeats fled before she answered. “The King,” she said softly. “The white deer is King Arthur.”

“And the hounds,” I said, “are everything that would destroy him.”

“Yes.”

Including the stubborn resentment in me. I did not tell Nyneve this, for I would no longer be a child and tell her everything; I was a knight now and I would find my own way. I asked her, “Why does Morgan le Fay wish him dead?”