He studied me. “You’re wounded,” he said, “and weary.” It was true, for it had taken me hard weeks to fight my way back to Camelot; I had ventured farther away from my sire’s court than I had thought. “Is that it? Come, do not kneel there; rise. You are a knight of the Round Table.” He gestured for me to sit next to him. “Go from us,” he told the servants and courtiers who were in the great hall, and they went silently away and left us alone. King Arthur turned his grave gaze to me. “Mordred, what is your need of healing? Tell me.”

But how could I explain to him? I could tell him that my fishermother was dead or that Nyneve was dead or that Gull lay dead and buried, without beginning to delve the depth of my despair. I could tell him that I was defeated, that my quest had failed—but he knew that already just from looking at me. I could tell him—but I could not tell him that I needed to be his son truly, that the fate coiled like a serpent around me, always whispering in my ear. To say anything more would have been treason.

“You know why I am sick at heart,” I said harshly, “as well as I do.” This was not quite true; I probably knew more of his own death, by that time, than he did.

He sat silently, his gray gaze awash with trouble. Then he lifted his hands, reached through the small distance between us and laid his palms on my hair, cupping my head between his hands. It was the first time he had touched me, except with his sword the day he knighted me.

His touch felt warm, that was all. If my pain had not been so great, his warm touch might have comforted me—but that was all. I felt no power of healing in him.

“Mordred?” he whispered.

I pulled back and looked at him. I remember that he wore the clothing of an ordinary yeoman—a plain russet tunic with a leather belt, brown breeches, brown boots—yet no one could have mistaken him for other than the King.

He saw in my eyes the answer to his barely spoken question. He laid his hands on the table and breathed out a long breath that might have been a sigh. “I cannot heal you,” he said, his voice low but steady now, as befitted a King. “I can not heal those whom I—” Whatever he had been about to say, he stopped short of it. He turned his hands palm up and looked at them as if they were strangers. He had fair hands, I remember, large knuckled and strong with no blemishes on them. “Like Guinevere,” he said quietly. “She is my own beloved wife, and I cannot help her.”

“Why is that?” I asked just as quietly.