The storm came down on Tintagel like a hand closing into a fist. I remember the taste of it — iron and salt, the wet stone of the corridor pressed cold against my cheek where I crouched behind the tapestry. I was nine years old, and I had been told to stay in my chamber. I had, of course, done nothing of the kind.
My father was riding home that night. I had heard the steward say so at dusk, his voice low, the way grown men speak when they think a war is almost over and are afraid to be wrong. Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. My father. The word still fit in my mouth then, round and certain, the way a stone fits a sling.
I had crept down to wait for him because my mother would not let me. Igraine had been pale all evening, moving through the keep like a woman walking on a frozen pond, listening for the crack. She had kissed my forehead twice at supper and then forgotten I was there. That was how I knew something had already gone wrong, though no rider had yet come to the gate.
The thunder rolled. Torches guttered in their iron throats. And then I heard boots on the flagstones — his boots, the long stride I knew the way a hound knows its master — and my heart leapt up so hard it hurt my ribs.
I almost stepped out. I almost ran to him.
What stopped me was the light.
The torch on the wall above me threw his shadow long across the floor as he passed. I saw the shape of my father — the broad shoulders, the wolf-pelt at his throat, the proud tilt of the head I had loved since I could stand. But the shadow fell the wrong way. The torch was on his left. The shadow stretched to his left also, as if a second, invisible light stood behind him, throwing him forward into a darkness that was not his.
I was nine. I did not yet have words for what I was seeing. But I had been taught by my old nurse to watch the world the way a hare watches a hedge, and I knew, with the cold certainty of small animals, that the thing wearing my father's shape was not my father.
It paused. It turned its head a fraction, as though it had heard a held breath. I did not breathe. I pressed my palm flat against the stone behind me and felt the keep itself, the old, listening bones of Tintagel, and I asked it without asking: hide me. Something in the wall answered. A coldness ran up my wrist into my shoulder, and the tapestry hung heavier in front of me, and the wrong-shadowed man did not look down.
He walked on, toward my mother's chamber.
I do not remember the climb back to my room. I remember only that when I reached it I was shaking, and my right hand — the hand I had pressed to the wall — was numb to the elbow, and stayed numb until dawn. Magic is real, my nurse had told me once, but it always takes the coin out of your purse first. That night I learned she had not been speaking in figures.
By morning the riders came with the true news. My father had been killed at Dimilioc before sunset. He had been dead, they said, while I crouched behind the tapestry watching him walk past me.
My mother did not weep. She locked herself in the stillroom for three days, and when she came out she was betrothed to the man whose army had killed him. I was not allowed to ask how. I was nine. I was a girl. I was, already, the kind of girl whose questions made grown men reach for the sign of the cross.
I learned, instead, to wait.
I waited eleven years.
I waited through my mother's second wedding and the birth of a half-brother I was not allowed to hold for long. I waited through the slow disappearing of every woman in the keep who had taught me anything worth knowing. I waited, and I watched, and I kept a small thing wrapped in linen beneath a loose board in the stillroom floor — a slim wand of dark wood, its tip set with a single amethyst, which my mother pretended not to know I had found.
And then, on a grey afternoon in my twentieth year, the horns sounded at Tintagel's gate.
I went up to the wall walk because I always did, when riders came. The wind was off the sea. The banners snapped. At the head of the column rode a man in a red cloak, mailed, crowned, smiling up at the keep as though he had always meant to own it.
The sun was low behind him.
His shadow fell forward, toward the gate.
The wrong way.