You know, I think, (said Queen Morgawse), that King Arthur and I share a mother? That we were both born of Queen Ygraine? That mine and my sister’s father was King Garlois of Cornwall, King Mark’s uncle? And that Arthur’s father was Uther Pendragon, who stole into my mother’s bed on the very night my father was killed –that Uther came to her in a likeness of my father he gained through an enchantment of Merlin’s?

Part of the bargain Merlin struck with Pendragon was that the wizard should raise any issue from the satisfaction of Uther’s desire. So, shortly after our brother was born, before my mother had named him, Merlin arrived and took him away. I was six summers of age, and my sister Morgan was four. Morgan and I would often speculate about what had become of the boy. Morgan’s imagination always tended towards darkness: she conjured stories in which the bairn was subjected to tortures, in which he died in fiery sacrifices; whereas I liked to think our brother was being raised as a prince in some far off land where he was happy. I hoped that he could forget, or, better, would never know the dark secret of his parentage. That he would never understand he was born of the rape of our mother by Uther – for rape it was, there is no other name for it. Our mother remarried, and for twelve years we neither saw the boy nor Merlin, though Morgan and I never entirely ceased speculating on our half-brother’s fate.

Would that had been the end of Merlin’s part in our lives, but he had not finished with us. In my eighteenth year, a little time before I first met my husband, Merlin visited us more and more frequently. Morgan was excited by his visits. My sister was always attracted to the darkness, and Merlin tempted her with the secrets of his art.

The wizard is a truly foul man, Drift of the Lake, as I believe your sister Neave may have told you. To have Merlin’s hands upon you – and his hands frequently stray towards young female flesh – is a repulsive thing. I shrank from his company. But Morgan struck a bargain with him. One day he arrived to take her on a journey. I wanted to protect her, so I insisted I accompany them.

He took us north – we still lived in Cornwall at that time. We travelled through forests and across wastes for several weeks, until we reached a strange place – a huge cave that belched a weird mist from its mouth. Merlin called it the Cave of the Dragon, and told us that the mist was dragon’s breath. He took my sister by the hand and offered me the other, but... the evil I felt in that place – I could not go any further. My sister, however, followed him into the cave most willingly. After they disappeared inside I approached the threshold of that cave several times with the intention of rescuing her, but each time I was overwhelmed with terror and fled. Oh gods! Ten times an hour I thought to run for help, but each time I tried to leave I felt something dragging me back, holding me in that bleak landscape. I suppose I was under an enchantment.

Merlin and my sister were within the cave for three days and nights. When they finally emerged back into the light my sister was transformed. She looked little different, but in the way she moved, the way she smiled, the way she looked at the world – she was quite changed. I remember I reached out to touch her hand and said her name.

Merlin said: ‘Call her mere Morgan no longer, but Morgan, Queen of the Faeries.’

That was when my sister took the name Morgan le Fay.

Merlin left us then. I tried to talk to Morgan about what had happened to her inside the cave, but she would not answer me. As we travelled the road I noticed strange things happening around us – birds would drop from the sky as they flew over our heads, there was a mist that never left us, as if Morgan had brought some part of the cave’s terrible magic with her. I wanted to go straight home to our mother, but Morgan insisted that we detour towards the west coast, and visit the house of Sir Ector de Maris, a minor knight who had been loyal to Uther. At Ector’s house we found his son, Kay, and a boy of twelve apprenticed as Kay’s squire, a slender, lazy boy called Arthur. You remember that our brother had no name when Merlin took him from us, and in truth I did not recognise him, but I felt there was something disturbing in the boy. It was in the way Sir Ector and Kay treated him, I think. He was nominally Kay’s younger brother, but the whole family had a way of deferring to the boy’s whims, as if they were scared of him... of what he might become.

Morgan took such an interest in this young man that I became certain something was not right. She had never shown much interest in boys, but the way she was with this Arthur – first teasing, and then falling into his arms – almost made me feel sorry for the sad little creature. He was four years younger than Morgan, and six years my junior, but the attention he received from Morgan – attention he had done nothing to earn – gave the already conceited boy an exceptionally high opinion of himself. Not content with my sister’s affection, Arthur began to expect, to demand mine. I remember the way he would touch me without invitation, how he would bar doors and demand a kiss before he let me past. He was lewd for a boy for his age, and charmless – sometimes young boys are confident with girls, like my son Gareth, and sometimes they are shy, like Gaheris – and girls, well, girls will find those things charming, attractive and frustrating according to their tastes. But rarely in my experience do young boys have Arthur’s grotesque sense of entitlement. That tends to be the preserve of powerful older men who have forgotten what it is to be refused.

We stayed with Sir Ector longer than I would have liked, but eventually Morgan and I continued on our journey.

Shortly after our return home I met and married Lot of Orkney, though that was before he was elected king of these islands. There were other suitors for my hand; I do not think it immodest to say that I was very beautiful in my younger days. Among my suitors was Lamorak, whom I had known since childhood. I say known, but the boy was like my Gaheris, so shy in female company he was nearly mute. Lot made me laugh, and was serious when seriousness was called for; he won my heart effortlessly, and though I was nervous about leaving the warmth of the south for the – as I thought them – frozen wastes of the north, I knew Lot’s love would sustain me. So I refused Lamorak’s proposal, to which he had been driven only when it was clear that Lot had already won me. I later heard things about Lamorak that disturbed me. He was an angry young man, and expressed in most cruel violence what he could not in words.

But once here on Orkney I gave little thought to him, or to Arthur, or even, it pains me to say, my sister. I wrote often to my mother, and she told me that Morgan was rarely with her – she spent most of her time in the lands of Gore to the east. Our mother had heard rumours that Morgan had fallen under the influence of the priestesses at a black chapel in the marshes there. But shortly before the birth of my first son, Gawain, I received word that she was to marry King Uriens of Gore. I was most relieved; it seemed to me that my sister must have forsaken the strange life she had enjoyed to that point, and decided to enter the world as a normal woman. In my condition I could not travel to their wedding, but sent her my love and gifts. I received no thanks in return.

Five years passed. Five years most wonderful, but barren. I raised my firstborn, but conceived no more children. I wondered if something had happened to my womb in the birth of Gawain, and if he was the last child I would ever bear Lot. Sometimes I was concerned that my husband would fall out of love with me, that he would seek a more fecund woman to bear him more sons, but each time he returned from his campaigns he would reassure me that his love for me was strong, and that a single heir was enough. Gawain was a strong lad – he took after his father – and Lot told me that such a son was the only one he needed. Our gods would provide more children if they saw the need.

In that fifth year, the eighth of my marriage, my mother’s second husband died, and I received a letter from her telling me that she would visit Morgan and Uriens, and then come north to see me and her grandson. This was during the campaigning season, and Lot had been across the sea with his war-band for two months. I hoped that when my mother arrived she would accept my offer to live here permanently.

Three weeks after receiving the last of my mother’s letters, late in the month of July, as I was expecting my husband’s return, the heralds cried up that three visitors had arrived on the island, among them the Queen of Gore, my sister. I hurried to prepare a greeting for my mother, Morgan and King Uriens her husband; I naturally assumed it was they. When I arrived in the great hall with Gawain by my side, however, I was disappointed in all my hopes. The three who stood before me were my sister, draped sluttishly over the lanky form of Arthur, now twenty years of age, and my old suitor Lamorak.

‘Sister,’ Morgan said drunkenly, ‘look who I have brought with me.’ I remember her fingers working their way beneath Arthur’s shirt; he pawed her in return. ‘It’s Arthur, our old friend from the house of Sir Ector.’ She turned to the giant on her other side, and looked suggestively between Lamorak and me. ‘And your childhood sweetheart.’ She could not stand straight, so taken she was with drink and whatever else she had consumed. If Arthur had not been there she would have fallen to the floor.

I tried to maintain my composure, as befits a queen. ‘My sister, I said, ‘but where is our mother? I received word she would visit first you and then come to Orkney.’

Morgan sniffed, though she showed no sadness. ‘Dead,’ she said. ‘Dead on the road before she got to Gore. Drowned in the marshes.’ And then she laughed, as if Ygraine’s death was a jest.

Arthur pushed Morgan away from him, so that she now slouched against Lamorak. He stepped forward, and hitched up the legs of his breeches so he could crouch before Gawain. ‘And who is this fine strong, lad?’ he said in his thin, raking voice.

Gawain giggled, but I held him to me so he could not go to Arthur. Then the future king looked up at me, and in his black eyes I saw the same sense of unthinking desire and entitlement I had seen all those years before. ‘He’s almost as fine as his mother, who has increased in beauty since last we met.’ He examined me from head to toe, with none of the proper decencies. I knew he had not changed at all; he remained the over-indulged boy he’d been at twelve.

Morgan exploded in laughter. She dashed forward and put her arms around Arthur, pressing her body to him. ‘Arthur really is a special boy,’ she said over his shoulder. ‘Quite the discovery. And how do you find my sister, Lamorak?’

The giant brute did not speak. He grunted, and stared at me. I could see that he had changed: what I had found sad and pitiable in him when we were younger had turned to something hard and brutal.

I sent Gawain to some good people on another of the islands, and prayed for my husband’s speedy return, but three days passed without sight of his ship. In that time Morgan, Arthur and Lamorak infected this house with their debaucheries. I hoped to get my sister away from them, to talk of our mother in private, to begin reforming her way of living, but she would not leave their sides. They talked... they talked of such filth as I cannot repeat; the terrible ways in which she, Arthur and Lamorak had betrayed King Uriens her husband, who is by all accounts a good man. She and Arthur even mocked my own husband in his absence. Morgan tried to convince me to join with them in their immorality. The only truly human emotion I saw from her was on the second night, when she wept and wept over her lack of children. ‘Will you have one and give him to me?’ she said in the depths of her despair.

The strongest men of Orkney were away with my husband, and Lamorak easily intimidated those who were left. When my men refused to follow Arthur’s orders lamorak beat them terribly – he even killed one man. These guests transformed my orderly house into a drinking den in three short days. I should have been strong for my people, but in truth I was scared. Back at Sir Ector’s house I had been strong enough to push past Arthur when he blocked the door to me, but now he was, if not very strong, stronger than me. Lamorak was no longer shy; he had learned to bully women with his size and strength, even myself, whom he had once claimed to love. Morgan said that as Lot had failed to give me a second son I should lie with Lamorak. My sister, my own sister, disgusted and terrified me.

That night – the third night – someone came into my room as I was sleeping. The first I knew of it was when my old handmaid Freya, who had been sleeping at the foot of my bed, leapt to her feet with her long knife in hand. Through the curtains I could see a large man in the shadows. Freya stalked towards him, and then I saw her relax. ‘My master!’ she said, ‘Oh mistress, the king has returned!’

I pulled back the curtains, and it was true. There was my Lot, come straight from his ship. The relief I felt at the sight of him was overwhelming. Before he could speak, the whole story of what had happened during the three days of my sister’s visit poured from my mouth in every horrible detail. He simply smiled his kind smile as Freya helped him undress, then he climbed into bed and held me to him. I felt so safe in those strong arms.

When I woke in the morning he was not there. I was more happy and relaxed than I had been in months, never mind the previous days, and I assumed that lot had gone to impose order on the chaos Morgan, Arthur and Lamorak had created around themselves. I called Freya into the room to dress me, and I asked her where my husband was.

‘The king, mistress?’ she said to me. ‘Why, we’ve just had word from abroad, as it happens. Now, he is well, I assure you, my lady. But the king is currently besieged in a land far to the south, by an army of Moors.’

I looked at her in horror, but she only responded with confusion. I shook her, trying to make her recall seeing Lot the night before. She remembered nothing.

‘I know your love’s absence is hard on you, mistress,’ she said, stroking my hair as I clutched her to me, sobbing into her knees. ‘I know he is your darling, but he will return, safe and well. He would never abandon you or his people.’ She took me by the shoulders and raised me to my feet. She dabbed my eyes dry. ‘There now, I have some good news for you, mistress. Your nasty guests left this morning. They took a boat and headed back south.’

And it was then that the whole thing became clear. I sat down on my bed, utterly numb. Like my mother before me, I had been raped by one man wearing the face of another. Though my rapist, whether he was Lamorak or Arthur, had not been aided by Merlin. It was Morgan, Morgan had used her evil magic and helped him to rape me.  

When I called Gawain back across from the island where I had sent him to safety, I found a note in his things. It said: When the child is born, I will take him from you. It was signed: Your ever-loving sister.