He looked at me, bleak. “I have done wrong. I must accept my punishment.”

Anger jolted me to my feet so suddenly that I overturned my chair. “But what have I done?” I cried at him. I did not wait for an answer, for there was no answer. I bowed, giving him barest courtesy, and then I left him.

That was a dark winter.

I spent it mostly in the kennel, lying in the straw with Gull’s puppies—full-grown brachets and brach-hounds now. Three spotted, one black; the three white ones had died. Any one of the four that survived would give me a nudge with a wet nose or a lick with a pink tongue, but none of them was Gull. Still, they were of some comfort to me.

I would not stay in the empty tower that waited for Nyneve and Pelleas to return. I found myself a chamber in the basement of the keep—a dank, shadowy place; it suited my mood.

Sometimes Gawain and Garet visited me there or in the kennel. They had heard that I was a fighter now, or they could see it in me, and they were friendly to me, even kind. They never spoke of Tintagel. And I knew that I should forgive them; what they had done—killing Pellinore, killing Morgause and Lamorak—it was no more than what was needful to defend their honor. Folk looked up to them, for they were knights of the Round Table and, yes, there was still that glow about them that had awed me when I first came to Camelot. But now I could not look at them without feeling my gut crawl.

They had done such bloody deeds.

I could not sleep at night. When I did sleep, my black dreams would show to me again what Merlin had showed me, the bloody deed I must do someday, and I would awaken in a cold sweat.

Evil. I could no longer doubt that I was fated to do evil.

I took to wearing black clothing. It suited my mood and made damsels turn their heads and look at me, though they shied away. Other than that, I did not think why I chose to dress in black; I wore it on a dark whim. I did not know then that I would be wearing black for eternity.

On a similar whim, I cut my hair to show what I had always hidden: the blemish behind my ear, the birthmark I had never seen. A mark like a ragged X, my mother, Morgause, had said. But Nyneve had called it a dark bird flying.

I hated myself.

I have only a few good memories of those shadowed days: