She put her face into her hands and wept behind them, silently, and no longer cared that the abbess was watching her.

THAT NIGHT IGRAINE'S BREATHING was so labored that she could not even lower her head to rest; she had to sit bolt upright, propped up on many cushions, to breathe at all, and she wheezed and coughed without end. The abbess gave her a draught of something which would clear the lungs, but it only made her queasy, she said, and she could take no more of it.

Gwenhwyfar sat beside her, drowsing a little now and then, but alert whenever the sick woman stirred, to give her a sip of water, to shift her pillows so that she could find a little ease. There was only a small lamp in the room, but there was brilliant moonlight, and the night was so warm that the door stood open into the garden. And through it all there was the ever-present muffled sound of the sea beyond the garden, beating at the rocks.

"Strange," Igraine murmured at last in a faraway voice, "never would I have thought I would come here to die. ... I remember how dreary I felt, how alone, when first I came to Tintagel, as if I had come to the very end of the world. Avalon was so fair, so beautiful, so filled with flowers ... "

"There are flowers here," Gwenhwyfar said.

"But not like the flowers of my home. It is so barren here, so rocky," she said. "Have you been in the Island, child?"

"I was schooled in the convent on Ynis Witrin, madam."

"It is beautiful on the Island. And when I travelled here over the moors, it was so high and barren and deserted, I was afraid-"

Igraine made a weak movement toward her, and Gwenhwyfar took her hand and was alarmed by its coldness. "You are a good child," Igraine said, "to come so far, when my own children could not. I remember how you dread travelling-and now to come so far, when you are pregnant."

Gwenhwyfar rubbed the icy hands between her own. "Do not tire yourself with talking, Mother."

Igraine made a little sound like a laugh, but it got lost in a fit of wheezing. "Do you think it makes any difference now, Gwenhwyfar? I wronged you-even on the very day you were wedded, I went to Taliesin and asked him, was there any honorable way for Arthur to get out of this marriage."

"I-did not know. Why?"

It seemed to her that Igraine hesitated before answering, but she could not tell, perhaps it was only that the other woman struggled for speech. "I know not ... perhaps it was that I thought you would not be happy with my son." She struggled again with a fit of coughing so heavy that it seemed she would never get her breath.

When she had quieted a little, Gwenhwyfar said, "Now you must talk no more, Mother-will you have me bring you a priest?"

"Damn all priests," said Igraine clearly. "I will have none of them about me-oh, look not so shocked, child!" She lay still for a moment. "You thought me so pious, that I retired to a convent in my last years. But where else should I have gone? Viviane would have had me at Avalon, but I could not forget it was she who had married me to Gorlois ... . Beyond that garden wall lies Tintagel, like a prison ... a prison it was to me, indeed. Yet it was the only place I could call my own. And I felt I had won it by what I endured there ... ."

Another long, silent struggle for breath. At last she said, "I wish Morgaine had come to me ... she has the Sight, she should have known I was dying ... ."

Gwenhwyfar saw that there were tears in her eyes. She said gently, rubbing the icy hands which now felt as taut as cold claws, "I am sure she would come if she knew, dear Mother."

"I am not so sure ... I sent her from me into Viviane's hands. Even though I knew well how ruthless Viviane could be, that she would use Morgaine as ruthlessly as she used me, for the well-being of this land and for her own love of power," Igraine whispered. "I sent her from me because I felt it better, if it came to be a choice of evils, that she should be in Avalon and in the hands of the Goddess, than in the hands of the black priests who would teach her to think that she was evil because she was a woman."

Gwenhwyfar was deeply dismayed. She chafed the icy hands between her own and renewed the hot bricks at Igraine's feet; but the feet too were cold as ice, and when she rubbed them Igraine said she could not feel them.

She felt she must try again. "Now with your end near, do you not want to speak with one of Christ's priests, dear Mother?"

"I told you, no," said Igraine, "or after all these years when I kept silent to have peace in my home, I might tell them at last what I truly felt about them.... I loved Morgaine enough to send her to Viviane, that she at least might escape them ... ." She began wheezing again. "Arthur," she said at last. "Never was he my son ... he was Uther's-only a hope of the succession, no more. I loved Uther well and I bore him sons because it meant so much to him that he should have a son to follow him. Our second son -he that died soon after his navel string was cut-him, I think, I might have loved for my own, as I loved Morgaine ... . Tell me, Gwenhwyfar, has my son reproached you that you have not yet borne him an heir?"

Gwenhwyfar bent her head, feeling her eyes stinging with tears. "No, he has been so good ... never once has he reproached me. He told me once that he had never fathered a son by any woman, though he had known many, so that perhaps the fault was not mine."

"If he loves you for yourself, then he is a priceless jewel among men," said Igraine, "and it is all the better if you can make him happy ... . Morgaine I loved because she was all I had to love. I was young and wretched; you can never know how unhappy I was that winter when I bore her, alone and far from home and not yet full-grown. I feared she would have become a monster because of all the hate I felt when I was bearing her, but she was the prettiest little thing, solemn, wise, like a fairy child. She and Uther only have I loved ... where is she, Gwenhwyfar? Where is she that she would not come to her mother when she is dying?"

Gwenhwyfar said compassionately, "No doubt she knows not that you are ill-"

"But the Sight!" Igraine cried, moving restlessly on her pillow. "Where can she be, that she does not see that I am dying? Ah, I saw she was in deep trouble, even at Arthur's crowning, and yet I said nothing, I did not want to know, I felt I had had enough grief and said nothing when she needed me ... . Gwenhwyfar, tell me the truth! Did Morgaine have a child somewhere, alone and far from anyone who loved her? Has she spoken of this to you? Does she hate me then, that she will not come to me even when I am dying, only because I did not speak out all my fears for her at Arthur's crowning? Ah, Goddess ... I put aside the Sight to have peace in my home, since Uther was a follower of the Christ ... . Show me where dwells my child, my daughter ... ."

Gwenhwyfar held her motionless and said, "Now you must be still, Mother ... it must be as God wills. You cannot call upon the Goddess of the fiends here-"

Igraine sat bolt upright; despite her sick swollen face, her blue lips, she looked on the younger woman in such a way that Gwenhwyfar suddenly remembered, She too is High Queen of this land.

"You know not what you speak," Igraine said, with pride and pity and contempt. "The Goddess is beyond all your other Gods. Religions may come and go, as the Romans found and no doubt the Christians will find after them, but she is beyond them all." She let Gwenhwyfar lower her to her pillows and groaned. "I would my feet could be warmed ... yes, I know you have hot bricks there, I cannot feel them. Once I read in an ancient book which Taliesin gave me of some scholar who was forced to drink hemlock. Taliesin says that the people have always killed the wise. Even as the people of the far southlands put Christ to the cross, so this wise and holy man was forced to drink hemlock because the rabble and the kings said he taught false doctrine. And when he was dying, he said that the cold crept upward from his feet, and so he died. ... I have not drunk of hemlock, but it is as if I had ... and now the cold is reaching my heart ... ." She shivered and was still, and for a moment Gwenhwyfar thought she had ceased to breathe. No, the heart was still sluggishly beating. But Igraine did not speak again, lying wheezing on her pillows, and a little before dawn the rasping breaths finally ceased.