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Next Sunday a priest would carry torches into the field and circle it in procession with his acolytes, chanting psalms and blessings. The richer barons and knights, who were all Christian, had persuaded the people that this was more seemly in a Christian country than the old ways, where the people lighted fires in the fields, and called the Lady in the old worship. Morgaine wished—and not for the first time—that she had been only one of the priestesses, not one of the great royal line of Avalon.

I would still be there, she thought, one of them, doing the work of the Lady . . . not here, like any shipwrecked sailor, lost in an alien land. . . . Abruptly she turned and walked through the blossoming garden, her eyes downcast, refusing to look any further at the apple blossoms.

Spring comes again and again, and the summer follows, with its fruitfulness. But I am as alone and barren as one of those locked-up Christian virgins within convent walls. She set her will against the tears which seemed somehow always beneath the surface these days, and went inside. Behind her the setting sun spread crimson over the fields, but she would not look at it; all was grey and barren here. As grey and barren as I.

One of her women greeted her as she stepped inside the door.

“My lady, the king has returned and would see you in his chamber.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Morgaine, more to herself than to the woman. A tight band of headache settled around her forehead, and for a moment she could not breathe, could not force herself to walk inside the darkness of the castle which, all this cold winter, had closed round her like a trap. Then she told herself not to be fanciful, set her teeth, and went to Uriens’ chamber, where she found him half-clad and lying on the flagstones, stretched out with his body servant rubbing his back.

“You have tired yourself again,” she said, not adding, you are no longer young enough to go about your own lands like this. He had ridden to a nearby town to hear about some disputed lands. She knew that he would want her to sit beside him and listen to his tales of all that he had heard in the countryside. She sat down in her own chair nearby and listened with half an ear to what he told her.

“You can go, Berec,” he told the man. “My lady will fetch my clothes for me.” When the man had gone he asked, “Morgaine, will you rub my feet? Your hands are better than his.”

“Certainly. But you will have to sit in the chair.”

He stretched out his hands and she gave him a tug upward. She placed a footstool under his feet and knelt beside it, chafing his thin, callused old feet until the blood rose to the surface and they looked alive again; then she fetched a flask and began to rub one of her herbal oils into the king’s gnarled toes.

“You should have your man make you some new boots,” she said. “The crack in the old ones will make a sore there—see where it is blistered?”

“But the old ones fit me so well, and boots are so stiff when they are new,” he protested.

Morgaine said, “You must do as you like, my lord.”

“No, no, you are right, as always,” he said. “I will tell the man tomorrow to come and measure my feet for a pair.”

Morgaine, putting away her flask of herbal oil and fetching a pair of shapeless old soft shoes, thought: I wonder if he knows that this may be his last pair of boots, and that is why he is reluctant? She would not think about what the king’s death would mean to her. She did not want to wish him dead—he had never been anything but kind to her. She slid the soft indoor slippers on his feet and stood up, wiping her hands on a towel. “Is that better, my lord?”

“Wonderful, my dear, thank you. No one can look after me the way you do,” he said. Morgaine sighed. When he had the new boots he would have more trouble with his feet; they would, as he had rightly foreseen, be stiff, and that would make his feet just as sore as they were now. Perhaps he should stop riding and stay at home in his chair, but he would not do that.

She said,