The bell at the gatehouse rang three times, the way it rings for kings, and I felt the sound in my teeth before I heard it in my ears. I was in the stillroom when it came, grinding dried mugwort with a pestle my grandmother had used before me. The pestle stopped of its own accord. My right arm, the one that had gone numb at nine and never quite forgotten, prickled awake.
Aelinor, who had been my nurse and was now something closer to a conspirator, looked up from the hearth. She did not speak. She only glanced at the floorboards beneath the worktable, where the amethyst-tipped wand lay sleeping in its wrapping of red linen, and then at me. Leave it, her eyes said. Not today.
It was Aelinor who had taught me, in the years after Gorlois died, how to read a shadow. Not the obvious way — children know which way the sun throws a man — but the truer way. Watch the edge of him, she had whispered once, kneeling beside me in the kitchen garden while a travelling friar passed the wall. A shadow that falls the wrong way belongs to a borrowed face. A shadow that frays at the hem belongs to a man who has paid a wizard. A shadow with two hearts in it — pray you never see one, child. Pray.
I had seen one, of course. Once. Eleven years ago. Behind a tapestry, with my knees drawn up and Tintagel's stones humming around me like cold bees.
"Lady," said one of Igraine's women at the stillroom door, breathless. "Your mother asks for you. The king is at the gate. He asks for the elder daughter."
The elder daughter. Morgause had been married off to Lot of Orkney three winters past. There was no elder daughter at Tintagel anymore. There was only me.
I wiped the mugwort from my fingers very slowly. "Tell my mother I am coming."
The woman fled. Aelinor caught my sleeve. "Your face," she said. "Mind your face. Whatever you see in the yard — your face must say welcome."
"I know."
"You do not," she said, and her grip tightened. "Morgana. If his shadow falls the wrong way — you smile. You curtsey. You do not look at it twice. Promise me."
I promised. I am not sure I meant it.
The stairs down from the stillroom are narrow and turn three times before they spill into the great hall. I went down slowly, smoothing the front of my grey wool dress, settling my hair beneath its plain linen coif. A healer's clothes. A daughter's clothes. Nothing that announced what else I was.
Igraine waited at the foot of the stairs.
My mother had been beautiful all her life and was beautiful still, in the way that frost on a windowpane is beautiful — clear, sharp, designed to keep things out. She wore the green gown she had been married in, the one she had not worn since the wedding. Her hands were folded. Her face was a mask I had never seen her wear, and yet, looking at her, I understood with a cold and sinking certainty that she had been keeping this mask ready, folded with the gown, for eleven years.
"Mother," I said.
"He has come," she said, as though we had been waiting for a guest invited long ago. "Walk with me to the yard. Smile when you see him. Do not — " Her eyes flicked up to mine, and for one heartbeat the mask cracked and I saw beneath it not surprise, not grief, but a tired and ancient apology. " — do not look at the ground where he stands."
I felt the floor go very far away.
She knew. She had always known. About the shadow. About the borrowed face. About the night my father died and a stranger in his shape had passed me in the corridor and lain with her in the dark.
I had no time to say any of it. She was already moving, and I followed, because that is what daughters do.
The yard was bright with banners I did not recognise: a red dragon on white, snapping in the sea wind. Men in mail. Horses lathered from hard riding. And at the centre of them, dismounting, was the crowned man.
I had promised Aelinor I would not look twice at his shadow.
I looked once.
It was enough. The shadow lay east when it should have lain west, and the western edge of it frayed like wet wool, and inside the frayed place something else moved — slow, patient, the shape of a tall thin man in a robe, standing just behind Uther Pendragon's left shoulder where no man stood.
The crowned king raised his head, and smiled at me, and said my name as if he had been practising it for years.
And in the frayed dark behind him, the second shadow smiled too.