“Your chamber was locked, was it not, Child of Merlin?”

“It was,” Emry said, not quite daring to meet the Lady’s gaze. “I heard screaming. I thought Arthur might be in trouble.”

“The prince is in no danger here,” said the Lady. “Avalon recognizes its future king. My forest screams because its magic was taken without permission. Taken by one who would open a doorway through any means possible.”

The Lady stared at Emry, as though wondering whether she had been planning the same thing.

“I have no interest in taking magic that doesn’t belong to me,” Emry said.

The Lady’s expression turned grave. “That’s not what it looked like.”

Emry winced, hating that the Lady was right. For a moment, she had been tempted. For more than a moment.

“I was only trying to help,” Emry insisted. “A creature led me here. It was small, like a fox, but so strange. It asked me to send it home.” She lifted her chin. “It seemed so lost, I figured I had to try.”

The Lady stared at her in surprise. “What happened to the creature?”

“It went through the henge,” Emry said. “But after it did, the stone wouldn’t let me go. I—thank you, for coming when you did.”

The Lady of the Lake considered her. “That was the Questing Beast,” she said. “Many men have wasted their lives in pursuit of that creature. Its blood can bring someone back from a freshly dug grave, but its bite is a pain worse than any mortal wound.”

Emry swallowed nervously. She’d knelt down and petted it like a puppy. “I didn’t know,” she said.

The Lady of the Lake’s expression softened. “Be careful, child,” she warned. “Your heart was in the right place, but you were foolish to open something you didn’t know how to close. Such doors go both ways.”

“I’m sorry,” Emry mumbled again.

The Lady was right, she had been foolish. Her palm stung, and when she stared down at it, she saw that her wound had closed, replaced by a thin scar that shone bright silver.

“You showed great strength, to resist the temptation of Anwen’s magic,” said the Lady. “Perhaps I needn’t have locked your door after all.”

Emry frowned. But the Lady didn’t say anything else. She merely motioned for Emry to follow her back to the cloister.

Emry fell gratefully into bed, exhausted. While she slept, she dreamed of strange animals in the forest, and of her father, trapped in a slab of stone. And then the dream shifted, and it was no longer her father who was trapped in the stone.

It was her.