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“So you are,” he replied, somehow making it sound as if he meant the opposite. “And, of course, there is nothing magical about you at all. Now remember. Keep my secrets.”

“I will,” she replied, and he turned and went rudely back into his pavilion, dismissing her as if she had been a churl and he—

Well, he was a prince. Rather more than just any prince, if he hadn’t been lying. Arthur’s son . . .

She didn’t put it past him to lie . . . but somehow she didn’t think he had this time. She turned her back on his tent and went off to her own tent and the single camp servant she shared with her troop, intending to get something to eat. Most of the men did their own cooking over their own fires; she had always found it better to forego some of the duties her servant would have done in order to make sure that everyone under her command was properly fed. And it was only as she was sitting with her troop, alternating bites of hard camp bread soaked in the gravy of the ever-present stew with bites of the stew itself, that many things she had already known suddenly fell together into a pattern.

That Medraut, as a baby, had looked as if he had been born before his time because he was born before his time. That he should have been born at the same time as the High King’s twin sons.

At the same time as Eleri’s son . . . she thought, and hastily shoved the thought away.

But . . . that meant he had been conceived at the time of the Great Rite. At the very wedding, the celebration that Lot and Anna Morgause had traveled to in order to pledge their fealty.

And that was when the world went to white about her, as it had not for many, many years. The bowl and bread fell from her nerveless fingers, and she heard, as if from a great distance, Owain and Aeron shouting, and felt hands catching her. But that was of no matter, because of what she was seeing . . .

Anna Morgause, alone in a luxurious tent, lit by a dozen candles, and much younger than when Gwen had last seen her, working . . . well, magic.

Some sort of magic.

Impossible to mistake it when the whole tent glowed with power, when there was a knife of white bone in her left hand and one of black flint in her right. When there was a tiny cauldron steaming over a charcoal brazier at her feet, and when there was a litter of small objects around that cauldron. Most of what she was doing was hidden by the woman’s body. The woman’s nude body. But when she turned, Gwen could see that she was written all over with signs and symbols in what could only be the blood of the black cat that lay dead on the floor of the tent beside her. And she had turned because a man had come into her tent.

He was tall, handsome, with a warrior’s body. He was somewhere between dark and fair, with a young man’s beard. He moved as if he was walking in his sleep. Anna Morgause smiled and drew him to her. The High King. It must be he, though Gwen had never seen him.

Then there was a moment of darkness. When it cleared, it was Anna Morgause surrounded by women, now in a stone-walled room, another brazier burning brightly, crying out in the throes of giving birth. And at the same time, overlaid onto Anna Morgause, Gwen saw another woman, a second woman, in another stone-walled room, fair-haired as Gwen herself, and even in the middle of her travail, beautiful, also giving birth . . .

Darkness passed across her eyes again. Again it cleared.

And then . . . she saw a new scene, a single bright space in the midst of the darkness. In the center of that, the same enormous serpent she had seen fighting the bear, striking at two handsome young man-boys, who must have been Medraut’s age. They fell dead without a cry.

And then she found herself lying on the snow with men around her, anxiously looking her over for some sign of sickness or a hidden wound, patting her face, putting snow to her forehead. It was Aeron who saw the sense in her eyes.

“Thank the gods, you’re back with us!” he exclaimed. And before he could say anything