Most days I went swimming. In the months of that first winter it was a necessity.

I would wake freezing in my hut on the top of the bald hill, my small fire long since burned out. The wind would whistle through the gaps between the hut’s stones, cutting through the poor blanket that was my only source of warmth. I’d stagger to the open doorway. If the sky was clear I could see all the way down to the grey castle on the cliffs, which had been dark and empty since Mordred broke its mistress’ power. I could have stayed in the castle if I had so pleased, but the place held too many memories. I had lived there with my friends for a time, before they sailed away from me.

I would climb down the rough steps I’d repaired in the hillside, and at the bottom turn right down the shadow of a path that ran beside the fast-flowing river. I would pass into the forest, and go down the steep side of the waterfall to the pool that marked the heart of the island. From there I followed the path all the way up the wooded valley, to the plain where the wild horses huddled together against the cold. That winter was hard on them, they lost their leader to the cold that year. The path ended at the foot of the wind-blasted stone cross, which nestled between the dunes facing the expanse of grey sea. Here I would leave my clothes, cross the cold sands, and plunge into the freezing waters.

The fish in the Lake – my mother’s lake – had been my friends, almost the only creatures in my life that did not judge me inferior. I had loved their simple thoughts – they had instincts only for food and safety. That is a special gift of my family, shared between my mother, my sisters and me – the ability to connect with the thoughts of other creatures through water. In the cold seas off the coast of Avalon, however, my gift became a curse.

By this time my magic had increased. I had learned to place suggestions in the minds of the creatures of the cold sea. I encouraged the fish towards my open hands, and when they swam between my fingers I squeezed the life out of them.

There is little as horrible in this world as being within the mind of a creature as it dies. Experiencing the panic and pain as the light of life disappears. But the fish never learned the lessons I taught them; each morning they would come to me, never remembering the mistake their brothers and sisters had made the day before.

I would shrug my clothes back on and return to the hut. There I would cook old friends on new fire, saying the one prayer to the Lord Jesus that Hilda, the previous owner of my hut, had taught me. In the n-n-n-n-n-name of the F-F-F-F-Father… I would say in my stuttering voice. I did not properly understand the words.

The longer I remained on island without sensing the evil I had stayed behind to fight, the more I thought my decision to become the hermit of Avalon a terrible mistake.

* * *

The opening storm of my first spring on the fortunate isle was a bad one. It raged for three days. On the third night I woke to find myself buried under the mossy roof of my hut. I struggled from under the wreckage, and discovered that the hut’s rough-hewn walls had collapsed. I shivered out that next day in the forest, and when the rains abated climbed back to the rubble of the hut. I paid my last respects at Hilda’s grave, marked by the rusting hilt of a blunted sword, and then I returned to Castle Eudaimon. I truly meant to rebuild the hut when the fine weather came, but I never did; I was not as committed a hermit as Hilda had been.

I crossed the remaining rotten planks of the castle’s drawbridge, and went through the gatehouse, into the huge yard between the outer and inner walls. Without the lady Bertilak’s power to keep it clean, the castle had become dirty from the birds that nested in its towers. The walls had cracked in the winter freeze. I could sense only a ghost of the lady’s magic in the fabric of the place; but even if she had all of her powers I knew I was safe from her. The island had wrapped her heartstring around me, giving me the same protection it had once given Hilda. I was Avalon's possession, just as the lady was. We balanced the island’s scales: she the Pagan, I the Christian weight.

I did not go through the heavy doors into the great hall. I knew that a century of Lady Bertilak’s contented guests lay dead behind those doors. Instead I went down the passage past the armoury, the bathhouse, the library where Epicene had taught me my letters, and on into the bleak and overgrown gardens, which in summer had seemed so beautiful. From there I passed through the gate in the garden wall, and went into the round Christian chapel that was so different from the rest of the place. It was the only part of the fortress that had not been touched by the winter.

I stood in the middle of the great, empty floor, staring at the cross that hung above the altar. I crossed myself as Hilda had taught me. But other than acting that one prayer, I had no idea how to use the place. So I simply stood, reflecting on my loneliness. I let my hand fall to my side, and felt another brush against mine. I turned with a start, but there was no one there. My mind was playing tricks on me: it was only the phantom of a hand that had once offered comfort.

* * *

I read a lot during that time. I began by searching for books about the Lord Jesus. There were many in languages I did not know how to read, but finally I found two that were written in unfamiliar letters in one column, and translated into British in another. One book was written by a man named Mark, the other by a Matthew.

In the first I found the story of the Lord Jesus' baptism in the waters of the River Jordan. This helped made sense of the water spell Hilda had cast upon me to make me a Christian. Mark also wrote of Jesus' miracles, of his betrayal by his friend Judas, of his death on the cross and resurrection to life.

The second book told much the same story, but contained much more detail, and recorded more of the Lord Jesus' words. It told the story of His birth, and King Herod's slaughter of the innocents in the hope of killing the rival king he did not understand. This made sense of something a girl had said on the ship that had brought my friends and me to Avalon. She had said that King Arthur was turning himself into a second Herod by sending us to our deaths. Matthew also recorded a beautiful speech the Lord Jesus gave on a mountain, about the meek inheriting the Earth, and peacemakers being blessed.

Neither book ever called the Lord Jesus a lord, which troubled me. The more I read the more I thought he didn't even like rich men very much. As I read and re-read the books I searched them for clues on how to use the chapel, but other than a ceremony with bread and wine that Jesus taught his followers, and a new prayer that made sense of the Father in Hilda's words of the cross, they offered little help on how to worship Him. I took to taking my meals in the chapel, and thinking about Jesus as I ate.

The spring was warm by the time I had exhausted these two books, and I began to think about preparing for the next winter. I found books on hunting, hawking and riding, most of them written by Sir Tristan – the man who had killed Mordred’s foster-brother, and kidnapped his foster-sister, the beautiful Iseult. I tried to ignore their author – if indeed Tristan really had written them – and took much good advice from their words.

I visited the wild horses on their plain, and they taught me to ride. I was nervous of approaching them at first, but it seemed they remembered how Melwas had won their trust many months before, and allowed me to saddle them. In the beginning I rode around the plain, and then one day I completed a circuit of the island, exploring parts of my hermitage I had never before seen. By the end of the spring I thought myself quite the horseman.

During my first winter I had a found a sheltered cave, which had been full of hay for the horses' winter feed. I guessed that Hilda had been responsible for stocking it. At the harvest-time I fashioned myself a scythe from weapons I found in the castle's armoury, and spent a month going around the edges of the island, cutting down the long grasses to make hay. The summer was almost over by the time the stock was replenished.

It was around this time that I found the Magikos. I wish to God I had not. The consequences of that discovery shame me to this day.

* * *

I had been occupied during the summer, and my loneliness had not weighed too heavily upon me, but as the light began to fail, and I brought in my little harvest of wild things for my second winter, my misery returned. I found a long poem in the library by a Roman named Virgil. It was about the Trojan hero Aeneas, who fled his burning city and went on to win the land that afterwards became Rome. Epicene had taught me a little Latin, but my progress through the poem was slow and halting. As my solitary days went on I began to lose my grip on reality.

One cloudy day I returned to the library to find a slim book in the place where I normally sat looking out of the window over the desolate gardens, the cliff edge, and out towards the open sea. I turned the book over in my hands, and saw that it was the Magikos, a book on magic by the Greek scholar Aristotle. Epicene had used Aristotle’s insights to break the spells that had hidden the truths of the island from us. I do not remember looking for the book. My mind was so disordered that it is possible I found it in my sleep, or in some other kind of trance; but I think it more likely the book was left there by a spirit: the lady’s spirit. I seem to remember looking out of the window on the day the book came to me, and seeing a reflection staring back that was not my own. It was a woman with round cheeks and short black hair. She was smiling at me. I started, and looked behind me. But there was no one else in the room. I believe that was my first sight of Lady Bertilak since Mordred had rammed his bloody sword down her throat on that last stormy night. I think she sent me the Magikos to entrap me. But I did not think of that at the time, the hope of discovering a way to see my friends again was too strong. I opened the book and began to read.

The book was in Greek, and very hard to understand, but over many days and nights I started to make some sense of the words, and how I could use Aristotle's theories about natural magic to begin my own experiments. I started to conjure images of my friends. At first they were insubstantial, malformed things, but as the leaves of the forest shrivelled and fell I became more confident in my abilities.

Finally I threw open the doors of the great hall of Castle Eudaimon, and cast a spell to hide the smells of decay and push the skeletons of Lady Bertilak's happy victims back under the skin of the place, so I could not see them. Soon the hall seemed brightly lit, its windows seemed mended, and all-in-all the place appeared as it had done when we first arrived, before the truth was revealed to us. Then I cast the other spell I had prepared.

And there they were, all my friends.

They were at game the first time I made them, repeating a turn of blind man's buff we had once played together. Elia the musician played her harp at the top of the hall. There were Aglinda and Alisander, almost the youngest of us, dancing around the blindfolded form of big Piers the farmer. There was handsome Palomides, Piers' lover, looking on in fondness and delight. Epicene the dark fire-sorcerer and Bellina the cruel beauty joined in the game, both of them more abandoned and less graceful than either would have been in real life. Melwas the Gaulish warrior leapt upon the table, followed closely by the eyes of blond Agravaine, King Lot of Orkney’s second son. Mordred, whom Melwas loved and who loved Melwas back, stood in the corner with baby Christian in his arms, the baby I had saved from the waves. Hilda had claimed that the babe was really my nephew. But my eyes fell most on the last of them: Palomina, Palomides' twin sister, with whom I had built the longboat that took them all away. She had kissed me, and I had kissed her back moments before she captained them to the open sea.

I watched them play for a while, and then made the vision of Palomina come towards me.

‘W-W-W-W-W-Well met,’ I said to her.

‘W-W-W-W-W-Well met,’ she said back to me in my own voice.

At the sound of our words the game stopped, and all of my visions turned to me. Bellina was closest, and I saw her face first. She had never liked me very much – she had called me troll – and I expected to see hatred on her face. But as I looked from her to the others, I saw that they were all wearing similar expressions of pity. My visions stared at me, reminding me of my hunched back and short legs. The worst was Palomina: her face made quite clear how disappointed she was by my poor appearance.

I fled to my room at the top of the castle’s north tower, threw myself on the bed, and sobbed.

* * *

I conjured myself a mirror of ice and looked at myself for the first time in a year. My mind was nearly broken by this time, and I thought I saw Lady Bertilak, more solid now, in the corner of my eye. I dismissed her from my mind, and focused on myself.

I remembered something Merlin had said to me, when he was posing as poor Margaret of the Marsh, my first friend: You can look as you please. You don’t have to be a hunchback all your life. I took the Magikos from my wooden chest, and looked for a spell that could make me handsome, as my mother used her powers to make herself appear youthful, even though she was thousands, perhaps millions of years old. By candlelight I searched the book for a hint at the correct spell, and then I found it. It was called a glamour, and using it I made my back appear straight, my legs long and strong, my chest broad and my arms more shapely. I looked at myself in the mirror and was pleased: Palomina would not hate me now. She would find me handsome.

‘That’s m-m-m-m-m-much b-better,’ I said to myself. And then I frowned. I returned to the book.

‘That’s much better. Perfect,’ I said, when my next spell was done.

* * *

My fake friends preferred my fake self; even Bellina would look on me and smile. I never took my glamour off, and these hollow ghosts became my constant companions through my second winter on Avalon. The image of Epicene would sit with me in the library as I read Virgil’s poem on Aeneas. Together we would look out of the window, where Aglinda and Alisander were playing in their treehouse, and Piers was tending the gardens, which I had made fresh and lovely, even in the snows.

But bit-by-bit my images began to disappoint me. I could never make them speak in their own voices. Although I spoke much more clearly now, the phantoms talked back only in my own voice. Neither could I find a way to make them substantial. They remained ghosts; my hands would pass through their forms when I reached out to touch them. The only resistance I ever felt was from the ghost of Lady Bertilak, which I would occasionally find in the great hall, working on a new tapestry. I paid no attention to her; I knew she could not harm me.

I had not been into the chapel for months. By this time I was more sorcerer than Christian. Below the ground I felt the godlike thing that was the island groan in concern. It was then, as I felt Avalon begin to turn against me, that I started to plot my escape. Avalon was the enemy – she had tricked me into remaining behind. With the Magikos before me, I looked for a way to snap the heartstring that tied me to the island.

In the end it was not Aristotle but Virgil who provided me with the inspiration I needed. I reached the place in his book where Aeneas falls in love with Dido, the Queen of Carthage. Aeneas wishes to remain as Dido’s husband, but his gods tell him that he has another destiny to fulfill. He sneaks away from the woman in the night, and as she sees his ship sail away the distraught Dido stabs herself on a burning pyre, prophesying that her people and Aeneas’ will be locked in a state of eternal war.

This story gave me the idea that I could burn out Avalon’s power, snap her heartstring, and transfer her magic to myself. With such power I knew I could be as powerful as Merlin. I could cross the sea in a single bound, deal with King Arthur in a moment, and save my friends from further torment. I began to lay magical charges under the surface of the island. The ground trembled under me as I went, trying to protect itself, but I had convinced myself that I was working for the greater good.

By the middle of the spring I was ready. I woke on the morning of May Day, my sixteenth birthday, ready to finish what I had started. I got out of bed, washed my much prettier face, and went to the window to look out on the sea as I did every day.

I blinked.

I blinked again.

There was a ship anchored off the coast of the island, and a boat rowing towards the horseshoe harbour up the coast.

I threw on my clothes, and dashed down the stairs. I collided with the now solid form of Lady Bertilak as I passed the great hall. I ignored her.

 The first visitors in nearly two years were coming to Avalon, but whether they were friend or foe was yet to be seen.