The boat scraped on the shore. He helped her from it. "Gwenhwyfar -are you certain?"

"I am certain," she said, trying to sound surer than she felt.

"Then I will escort you to the doors of the convent," he said, and it suddenly struck her that this took, for him, more courage than all the killing he had done for her sake.

The old abbess recognized the High Queen, and was awed and amazed that she should return, but Gwenhwyfar told the tale she had decided on -that evil tongues had wrought a quarrel between Arthur and Lancelet for her sake, and she had chosen to take refuge here so they might amend their quarrel.

The old woman patted her cheek as if she were the little Gwenhwyfar who had been lessoned here when she was a child. "You are welcome to stay as long as you wish it, my daughter. Forever, if that is your will. In God's house we turn no one away. But here you will not be a queen," she warned, "only one of our sisters."

Gwenhwyfar sighed with utter relief. She had not known till this moment how heavy it was, the weight of being a queen. "I must say farewell to my knight, and wish him well, and bid him amend the quarrel with my husband."

The abbess nodded gravely. "In these days, our good King Arthur cannot spare a single one of his knights, and surely not the good sir Lancelet."

Gwenhwyfar went out into the anteroom of the convent. Lancelet was there, wandering restlessly. He took her hands. "I cannot bear to say farewell to you here, Gwenhwyfar-ah, my lady, my love, must it be this way?"

"It must be so," she said pitilessly, but knowing that for the first time she acted without thought of herself. "Your heart was always with Arthur, my dearest. I often think the only sin we did was not that we loved, but that I came between the love you had for each other." If it could always have been among us three as it was on that Beltane night with Morgaine's love charm, she thought, there would have been less of sin. The sin was not that we lay together, but that there was strife, and less of love therefore. "I send you back to Arthur with all my heart, dearest. Tell him for me that I loved him never the less."

His face was almost transfigured. "I know that now," he said. "And I know, too, that I loved him never the less, and I felt always that I wronged you by loving him ... ." He would have kissed her, but it was not suitable here. Instead he bent over her hand. "While you are in God's house, pray for me, lady."

My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. She thought she had never loved him so much as at this moment, when she heard the convent door close, hard and final, and felt the walls shutting her in.

So safe, so protected, those walls had made her feel, in that day long past. Now she knew that she would walk between them all the rest of her life. When I had freedom, she thought, I desired it not, and feared it. And now, when I have learned to love it and long for it, I am renouncing it in the name of my love. Dimly she felt that this was right-the acceptable gift and sacrifice to bring before God. But as she walked through the nuns' cloister, she looked at the walls closing her in, trapping her.

For my love. And for the love of God, she thought, and felt a small seed of comfort stealing through her. Lancelet would go to the church where Galahad had died, and there he would pray. Perhaps he would remember a day when the mists of Avalon had opened, and she and he and Morgaine had stood together, lost, knee-deep in the waters of the Lake. She thought of Morgaine too, with a sudden passion of love and tenderness. Mary, Holy Mother of God, be with her too, and bring her to you one day ... .

The walls, the walls, they would drive her mad, closing her in, she would never be free again.... No. For her love, and for the love of God, she would even learn to love them again one day. Folding her hands in prayer, Gwenhwyfar walked down the cloister to the sisters' enclosure, and went inside forever.

MORGAINE SPEAKS ...

I thought I was beyond the Sight; Viviane, still younger than I, had renounced it, chosen another to be Lady in her place. But there was none to sit in the shrine of the Lady after me, and none to approach the Goddess. I saw it, helpless, when Niniane died, and I could not stretch forth my hand.

I had loosed this monster upon the world, and I had acquiesced in that move which should send him to throw down the King Stag. And I saw it from afar when, on Dragon Island, the shrine was thrown down and the deer hunted in the forest, without love, without challenge, without appeal to her who was giver of the deer; only arrows from afar and the edge of the spear, and her people hunted down like her deer. The tides of the world were changing. There were times when I saw Camelot too, drifting in the mist, and the wars raging up and down the land again, the Northmen who were the new foe plundering and burning ... a new world, and new Gods.

Truly the Goddess had departed, even from Avalon, and I, mortal as I was, remained there alone ... .

And yet, one night, some dream, some vision, some fragment of the Sight, drove me, at the hour of the dark moon, to the mirror.

At first I saw only the wars raging up and down the land. I never knew what came between Arthur and Gwydion, although, after Lancelet fled with Gwenhwyfar, there was enmity among the old Companions, blood feud declared between Lancelet and Gawaine. Later, when Gawaine lay dying, that great-hearted man begged Arthur, with his last breath, to make his peace with Lancelet and summon him to Camelot once more. But it was too late; not even Lancelet could rally Arthur's legion again, not when so many followed Gwydion, who now led half of Arthur's own men and most of the Saxons and even a few of the renegade Northmen against him. And in that hour before dawn, the mirror cleared, and in the unearthly light I saw the face of my son at last with a sword in his hand, circling slowly, in the darkness, seeking ...

Seeking, as Arthur in his day had sought, to challenge the King Stag. I had forgotten what a small man Gwydion was, like Lancelet. Elf-arrow, the Saxons had called Lancelet; small, dark, and deadly. Arthur would have towered more than a head above him.

Ah, in the days of the Goddess, man went against King Stag to seek his kingship! Arthur had been content to await his father's death, but now a new thing was coming upon this land-father and son enemies, and sons to challenge fathers for a crown ... it seemed to me that I could see a land that ran red with blood, where sons were not content to await their crowning day. And now, in the circling dark, it seemed that I could see Arthur too, tall and fair and alone, cut off from his men ... and Excalibur naked in his hand.

But through and around the prowling figures I could see Arthur in his tent, restlessly asleep, Lancelet guarding him as he slept; and somewhere, too, I knew Gwydion slept among his own armies. Yet some part of them prowled restless on the shores of the Lake, seeking in the darkness, swords naked, against one another.

"Arthur! Arthur, stand to the challenge, or do you fear me too much?"

"No man can say that I ever ran from a challenge." Arthur turned as Gwydion came from the wood. "So," he said, "it is you, Mordred. I never more than half believed that you had turned against me till now when I see it with my own eyes. I thought those who told me so sought to undermine my courage by telling me the worst that could befall. What have I done? Why have you become my enemy? Why, my son?"

"Do you truly believe that I was ever anything else, my father?" He spoke the word with the greatest bitterness. "For what else was I begotten and born, but for this moment when I challenge you for a cause that is no longer within the borders of this world? I no longer even know why I am to challenge you-only that there is nothing else left in my life but for this hatred."