The sea wind was wrong that morning. It came off the causeway carrying no salt, only a thin sweetness, like cut apples left out in a cold room. Aelinor felt it before I did. She tightened the lacing at my shoulder twice, then a third time, and would not meet my eyes. Her hands, which had braided my hair through every fever of my childhood, were shaking.
"Stand straight," she whispered. "Smile if he names you. Do not Read him in the yard, child. Not in the yard."
I almost laughed. Then I saw the ravens.
They had come in the night and not left. Three on the gate-arch, four along the chapel ridge, more on the wall-walk than the wall-walk had ever held, and not one of them calling. Teller-birds, Aelinor had taught me once, gather where a thing is about to be told. I did not know yet what they had come to tell. The dew on the slate under their feet had frozen in small bright rings.
My mother came down the stair behind me in her wedding silver. Igraine of Cornwall, widowed in winter and re-wed before the thaw, and you could not have read a single line of grief from the smooth water of her face. I tried. I am her daughter and I am a Reader and I tried, and I got nothing but the still surface a deep well shows a child leaning over it.
"My lord husband waits," she said, and took my hand the way one takes a horse's bridle.
Uther stood in the centre of the yard with his retinue ranged behind him in a half-moon of mail. He was not as large as the songs said. He did not need to be. The grey stones of Tintagel, which had stood against my father, leaned a little towards him; that was worse than size.
His shadow lay long across the slate to my left.
The other one lay to my right.
I made myself breathe. One body. Two shadows. The second was thinner, a man's outline that no man in the yard cast, and it fell against the sun instead of away from it, and where its edge touched the wet stone the wet stone went briefly dry.
"Lady Morgana of Cornwall," said Uther, and smiled, and held out his hand.
I gave him mine because my mother's fingers were a vice on my elbow. His palm was warm. That surprised me. I had expected the cold of the second shadow, and instead he was a man, only a man, with calluses where a sword had ridden for twenty years.
He looked down into my face for a long, considering moment.
"You have your father's mouth," he said.
The yard tilted. Gorlois's mouth. The mouth Uther's war had stopped. He said it gently, almost kindly, the way a man might remark on weather, and behind his eyes I could not tell whether he meant it as cruelty or as something stranger, an offering. My mother's hand on my elbow did not so much as twitch. She had known he would say it. She had perhaps known the shape of every word he would say today, and stood there in her silver and let him.
Little Reader.
The voice was inside my skull, quiet as a thought I had not thought. I did not flinch. I am proud of that. I kept my face for my mother and looked, only with my eyes, past Uther's shoulder.
The thin man stood in the second shadow. He stood inside it the way a hand stands inside a glove. No one else had marked him. No one else could.
Do not look at me with your face. Look down. Yes. Good. The ring on the slate, child — at your foot, where the wrong shadow lay. Take it before your mother sees. Take it now.
I lowered my eyes as if in maiden's modesty. There, on the wet slate by my slipper, lay a small circle of incised silver no bigger than a hazelnut — a naming-ring, the forbidden kind, the kind Aelinor had once shown me and then refused to speak of again. It had not been there a heartbeat ago.
And as I bent, as my fingers closed, a young knight at the back of Uther's half-moon went very still. Dark hair, a good plain face, eyes that found mine before he could stop them. His lips parted on a name — my name — and he caught it back behind his teeth so hard I saw the cost of it. He did not know I saw. He looked away as if struck.
I did not know him. He knew me.
The silver was cold in my palm, and then, slowly, against the rule of every cold thing I had ever held, it began to grow warm.