He told it to me dryly, in simple words, what would someday happen at a place called Glastonbury—but my stomach heaved, for I saw it happening. I saw the sunset battlefield, the thousands of knights lying dead, or wounded and groaning. I saw the few left standing, one of them King Arthur—my heart turned to water at the sight of his noble face. I saw the traitor rush upon him with drawn sword—it was I, Mordred. I saw King Arthur catch him below the shield with his lance, running him through, and I saw Mordred so possessed by desperate hatred that he thrust himself up to the cross-piece of the lance and dealt King Arthur a blow with the sword that cut through the helmet and into the skull beneath. Then he—I—fell to the earth, stark dead and gruesome with blood. I scried it all in the darkness of Merlin’s eyes.

The knowledge drove through me like the lance I would someday take in my gut. I knew it was a wound from which I might never heal.

I felt faint. I felt my innards crawling like a nest of vipers. “Go away,” I begged.

He clacked his beak at me, and chuckled once more, then flew—I did not see where, nor did I care. I lay on the ground, my face in the dirt, and I thought I would vomit but I did not, and I thought I would weep but I could not; all the tears had turned to stone in me.

I lay there through the night, with no white shadow beside me any longer. The wind moaned across the face of the empty world.

In the morning I struggled up, got on my horse and rode back toward Camelot. My quest was over.

BOOK FOUR

The Raven

14

ON MY KNEES BEFORE KING ARTHUR, I BEGGED, “HEAL me.”

“Mordred, lad.” His voice faltered with surprise. “What has happened?”

I looked up at him where he sat in his place at the rim of the Round Table. I looked into his sea-gray eyes, wise, regal, goodly, fierce, and fair, at his rugged face, so proud—yet for all his kingly pride, he did not hesitate to care for me. His gray gaze misted with worry. He knew the prophecy, yet he could feel for me? Yearning choked me; I could not speak.