The ravens came before the banner did.
I counted seven on the seaward gable when I woke, and three more on the chapel cross, and by the time I had laced my sleeves there were too many to count. They did not cry. That was the wrong of it. Ravens are loud birds; these sat the stones of Tintagel as if listening for a name.
Aelinor found me at the stillroom door with a sprig of emberfern crushed between her fingers, the green smell of an older age clinging to her skirts. She had been my nurse since I could stand, and she was the one who first set my child's palm against a candle and said, Watch the dark it throws, not the flame. The flame lies prettier. She taught me to read shadows the way other mothers teach girls to read psalters.
This morning her hands shook.
"Listen to me, lamb." She drew me into the alcove where the wall is thickest and the sea is loudest. "If a man comes through that gate and his shadow falls a hand's breadth wrong — if it leans when he stands still, if it carries a second heart inside it like a stone in a sack — you do not name what you see. Not aloud. Not even to me. A shadow with two hearts is one body with two tenants, and the second one hears its name spoken the way a hound hears a whistle."
"Aelinor —"
"Swear it."
I swore it. Her relief was not relief; it was the look of a woman who has paid a price and is counting what is left in her purse. She kissed the crown of my head and went down the stair ahead of me, and I noticed, because I notice such things, that the dew on the threshold stone had frozen in a single neat print where no foot had stood.
My mother was waiting at the foot of the stairs.
Igraine wore her wedding gown. Not the gown she had worn for my father — that one was burned, with him — but the new one, the colour of bone and beaten cream, stitched in the southern fashion the new court favoured. She had not yet put on the circlet. Her hair was loose, the way it had been when I was small, and for a breath I almost forgot what day it was.
She took my wrists. Her fingers were cold as well-water.
"Morgana. When he comes into the hall — and he will come into the hall, very shortly — you will keep your eyes on his face. On his face, do you understand me? Not his hands. Not his boots. Above all things, child, do not look at the ground where the king stands."
I looked at her then the way she had taught me never to look at anyone, and I read her. She did not flinch. She let me. And what I read, beneath the steady mouth and the wedding paint, was that she had known. Not since yesterday, when the riders came. Not since the betrothal. She had known what Uther Pendragon was on the night my father rode out to die, and perhaps before, and she had married him anyway, with her eyes wide open, for a reason she had not yet given me.
The horn went on the wall.
The red dragon banner came up the causeway in a wind that should not have lifted it — the sea was still, the gulls had gone quiet — and Uther rode beneath it with the unhurried patience of a man who has already taken the room he is entering. He did not look at the keep. He looked at the door I stood behind, as if he had been told which door.
In the hall he gave the proper words to my mother. Then, before any steward could prompt him, before the bishop could lift a hand, he turned his helm under his arm and said, mild as milk, "Bring me the elder daughter."
He said Morgana like a man saying a line he had practised in the dark.
I came forward. I kept my eyes on his face. I kept them there for as long as a daughter may, and longer, and I thought I had won — and then a torch behind him guttered, and I forgot myself, and I looked down.
His shadow lay the wrong way on the rushes. It leaned toward the door he had come through, not away from the fire, and inside that leaning dark, a hand's breadth behind his heel, a second figure stood. Tall. Thin. Robed. Patient as a heron at a pool. He had not come through any gate of mine.
He turned his head, inside the shadow, and looked at me.
And smiled.