Then I saw, atop a long shadow edging toward my foot, the shadow of the murderer.

I looked up. Perched on top of the standing stone, he was only a dark shape against the glare of the lowering sun. “If I had a bow and arrow, you would be dead,” I told him.

Just an ordinary pigeon hawk, as I have said. A merlin.

Merlin.

And how I hated myself for having set him free.

With a hawk’s chuckle he swooped down and landed on the ground, three feet from me, within my sword’s reach, as if to dare me. Try it, he said, the words sounding inside my head.

My hand closed around my sword hilt so hard that my fist whitened and trembled, but I did not move.

Go ahead, Merlin said. I have no human form anymore, no human powers. Only the powers of a hawk—to fly high and far, to see acutely, to strike hard.

“You are speaking to me,” I whispered between clenched teeth.

That is your power, that you can hear me. Not mine.

I hated him almost as much as I hated myself. And it seemed to me that perhaps he wished to die, having had his revenge upon Nyneve. But some stubbornness within me would not let me kill him. Just as it would not let me kill myself.

He stood there with his dark stare and his wrinkled blinking eyelids and his sooty mustache of feathers drooping around his beak, a paltry bird to have done such damage, shifting his wax-yellow feet in discomfort because he was not used to perching on the ground.

It’s no use, Mordred, he told me. You are who you are. Stop struggling against it.

But—if it were not for him, for his prophecy—who would I be?

I said, my voice as gritty as Gull’s grave, “I should kill you for what you have done to me.”

He chuckled again, a pigeon hawk’s shrill giggle, ki-ki-ki. He said, As a favor—because you found me despite all the baffles Nyneve had put in the way, and because in the goodness of your heart you freed me—I will tell you what you want to know.

I stared at him.

He said, You came to find out your own fate, is it not so?

I sat clutching my sword. I could not move or speak.

He told it to me anyway. He told me that I would live a few years more, and he told me the manner of my own death.