I looked around at twining plum trees, at snickering fountains, at tawny roses climbing to the sky, all golden in sunset light. Even without the music of the mystic harper, this was a garden of surpassing beauty. “Let’s stay here tonight,” I said to Gull. I sat down on the soft turf and patted my faithful brachet and watched her grin and pant in reply. I pressed my nose to her wet nose and stared cross-eyed at her. She licked me under the chin and I grinned; I felt happy. Maybe that was the answer to my quest, just to do good and be happy. Maybe there was no need to go on looking for Merlin.

In the morning it was all gone.

Roses, gone. Fruit trees interlaced into pavilions roofed in living leaves, gone. The golden spiral cage upon which the hawk had made harp music, gone. Fountains, hedges, yew trees shaped like peacocks, all gone. Even the tors with their muttering and their tottering crags, even the tittering forest—gone. Awakening, I blinked, and sat up and blinked again; I lay within a great hulking circle of standing stones—all that remained of the garden wall—on a wide, windy plain.

My sense of happiness, gone. The stones loomed, casting long shadows on me.

“Gull, come on.” I got up, in a hurry to be away from that uncanny place, and went to catch the horse and saddle it and arm myself to ride. Gull trotted after me, cheerful as ever, her white wag of a tail merry in the air.

I had just buckled the breast harness to the saddle, and was turning to reach for the bridle, when I saw Gull fall.

Struck down by an invisible blow.

Her head snapped up as her back collapsed. Her mouth opened as if to cry out, but she made no sound. She thudded to the ground.

I ran to her. Still alive but dying, she looked up at me with stricken eyes. I dropped to my knees beside her and cupped her head in my hands. “Gull, what . . .” But my voice came out a puppyish whimper as I stared. She was broken, her back and neck shattered like a dove when the peregrine drops upon it and strikes it like a gauntleted fist out of the sky.

“Gull?” I whispered, bewildered. She gazed back at me, her suffering eyes pooled as dark and deep as ladywater, and in them I saw. I saw the hawk black and silent against the high sky, flying away. I saw—I saw that it had struck hard, for I saw white feathers drifting down like snow. Then I saw the prey falling, its pointed wings strewn ungracefully in death.

The white falcon.

Dead.

Killed.

I saw Nyneve. Her hawk-red hair flying as her head snapped up. Her face like a white flower, haunted, as her mouth opened in a silent scream.