"Now you ride to Camelot with your son," said Morgaine quietly, "but not as I foresaw. I think the Sight is given to mock us-we see what the Gods give us to see, but we know never what it means. I think I will never use the Sight more, kinsman."

"God grant it." Lancelet took her hands in his own for a moment; then he bent and kissed them.

"And so at last we part," he said softly. And then, for all she had said of refusing the Sight, she saw in his eyes what he saw when he looked at her-the maiden with whom he had lain in the ring stones and from whom he had turned away from fear of the Goddess; the woman he had gone to in a frenzy of desire, trying to blot out the guilt of his love for Gwenhwyfar and Arthur; the woman he had seen pale and terrible, holding aloft the torch when they had taken him in Elaine's bed; and now the dark, quiet Lady, shadowed in lights, who had lifted his son from the Grail and pleaded with him to leave it forever outside the world.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the brow. There was no need for words; they both knew it was farewell and benediction. As slowly he turned from her and stepped into the magical barge, Morgaine watched the droop of his shoulders and saw the glint of the setting sun on his hair. It was all white now; and Morgaine, seeing herself again in his eyes, thought, I too am old ... .

And now she knew why she had never again caught sight of the queen within the land of Fairy.

I am the queen now.

There is no Goddess but this, and I am she ...

And yet beyond this, she is, as she is in Igraine and Viviane and Morgause and Nimue and the queen. And they live in me too, and she ...

And within Avalon they live forever.

13

Far to the north, in the country of Lothian, word came seldom and unreliably of the quest for the Grail. Morgause waited for the return of her young lover, Lamorak. And then, half a year later, word came to her that he had died on the quest. He was not the first, she thought, and he will not be the last to die of this monstrous madness, leading men to seek for the unknown! Always I have thought that religions and Gods were a form of madness. Look what they have brought on Arthur! And now they have taken my Lamorak, still so young!

Well, he was gone, and though she missed him and would always miss him in her own way - he had been at her side longer than any other, save only Lot - she need not resign herself to old age and a solitary bed. She scanned herself in her old bronze mirror, sponged away the marks of her tears, then surveyed herself again. If she no longer had quite the full-blown beauty that had brought Lamorak, dazzled, to her feet, she was still a good-looking woman; there were still enough men in the land, and not all of them could have been caught by this questing madness. She was rich, she was Queen of Lothian, and she had her woman's weapons - she was still handsome, with all her own teeth, though now she must blacken her fading eyebrows and eyelashes ... they were such a pale-gingery color now. Well, there would always be men; they were all fools, and a clever woman could do with them what she liked. She was no fool like Morgaine, to fret over devotion or virtue, nor a whining idiot like Gwenhwyfar, to think always about her soul.

From time to time some tale of the quest, each one more fabulous than the last, would reach her. Lamorak, she heard, had come back at last to Pellinore's castle, drawn by an old rumor of a magical dish that was kept there in a crypt beneath the castle, and there he had died, crying out that the Grail floated before him in the hands of a maiden, in the hands of his sister, Elaine, as she had been in childhood ... she wondered what he had really seen. Word came, too, from the country near the Roman wall that Lancelet was dungeoned somewhere in sir Ectorius' old country as a madman, and that no one dared send word to King Arthur; then she heard that his brother Bors had come and recognized him, and he had come to his wits and ridden away, whether to follow the quest further or to ride back to Camelot she neither knew nor cared. Perhaps, she thought, with luck he too would die on this quest; otherwise the lure of Gwenhwyfar would draw him back yet again to Arthur and his court.

Only her sensible Gwydion had not gone on the quest, but had remained at Camelot, close to Arthur's side. Would that Gawaine and Gareth had had the wit to do the same! Now at last her sons had come into the place that should always have been theirs with Arthur.

Yet she had another way to know what was happening. Viviane had told her, in her youth at Avalon, that she had not the patience nor the hardihood for initiation into the Mysteries, and Viviane-she knew it now -had been right; who would wish to forsake life for so long as that? For many years she had believed that the doors of magic and of the Sight were closed to her, save for such little tricks as she had mastered on her own. And then she had begun to understand, when first she had used her sorcery to discover Gwydion's parentage, that the magical art was there, awaiting her, needing nothing but her will; having nothing to do with the complex Druidical rules and limitations about its use, or lies about the Gods. It was simply a part of life, there and accessible, nothing to do with good or evil, but available to anyone who had the will and the ruthlessness to use it.

All those who pretend to religions, Morgause thought, wish only to keep the sources of power in their own hands. But now I have them freely and of my own making, without binding myself by oaths about their use or direction.

So now, on this night, shut away from her servants, she made her preparations. She felt a dispassionate sympathy for the white dog she had brought in, and a moment of genuine revulsion as she cut its throat and set forth the dish of hot blood she had caught; but, after all, it was her own dog, as much hers as a pig she might have slaughtered for the table, and the power of spilled blood was stronger and more direct than the power built up by the long prayers and disciplines of the Avalon priesthood. Before the fireplace, one of her servant-women was lying, drugged and ready, before the fireplace; not one, this time, for whom she had any affection or any real need. She had learned that lesson when last she had attempted this. She spared a regretful thought for the waste of a good spinning woman that time; at least this one would be no loss to anyone, not even the cook who had half a dozen more helpers than she needed.

She still felt a certain squeamishness at the preliminaries. The blood marking her hands and forehead was unpleasantly sticky, but it seemed to her that she could almost see, billowing forth from the blood like smoke, the thin streams of magical power. The moon had shrunk to the thinnest of glimmers in the sky, and she knew the one who awaited her call in Camelot would be ready. At the precise moment the moon moved into the proper quarter of the sky, she poured the rest of the blood into the fire and called three times aloud.

"Morag! Morag! Morag!"

The drugged woman by the fireside-Morgause vaguely recalled that her name was Becca, or something like that-stirred, her vague eyes taking on depth and purpose, and for a moment, as she arose, it seemed that she was wearing the elegant garb of one of Gwenhwyfar's waiting-women. Her voice, too, was not the rough dialect of the dim-witted country girl, but the careful speech of a southern court lady.

"I am here at your call. What would you have of me, Queen of the Darkness?"

"Tell me of the court. What of the Queen?"

"She is much alone since Lancelet has gone, but often calls young Gwydion to her. She has been heard to say that he is like the son she never had. I think she has forgotten that he is the son of Queen Morgaine," said the girl, the careful speech so incongruous from the empty-eyed, rough-handed kitchen girl in her shapeless smock of sacking.