In the depths of the Forest Sauvage there is an old, tumble-down ruin. On either side of the moss-choked walls, there runs a river, cold and clear and singing even in the deeps of winter, and this river winds its way to a wide lake, mist-shrouded, reed-fringed. On the far side of the lake there is Bywater, whose people take to the water in coracles with nets; but there are fish within that they have not caught, nor can they. On the side that abuts the forest, there is a place marked by a circle of stones standing on their ends, each one the height of a man, little more. Each is placed so that their crown marks a star and a day; each is faded and worn by the rain and the wind. They stand lonesome.

A ways, a ways, there is a cottage; thatch-roofed, stone-walled, surrounded by a wild garden, by fruiting trees that spring up in orchards, by bees and their hives. The windows are shut, the door likewise; the girl who opens them in the morning is Beth Hooper, here for the season. The three cats have to be fed, after all: Tybalt, Palug, and the third who refuses a name, big and heavy and insistent on her dominion over the cottage. The bees have to be tended. The garden must be weeded. It would not do for the Lady of the Lake to come back and find her affairs out of order. All year she was here, after her outing last winter, and it was Brigid who saw to the house then. The Lady's got business across Britain, she does, in far-flung places; why else would she leave her perfect little house?

And on the Bristol Avon, there's a lady with her hair loose on her shoulders, and she's on her own coracle with her own oar. And she's got a fair sword naked in her lap, and she's not wearing samite. That's for queens. Constance Nim, daughter of the Bristol Avon, is no queen; she is a fixed point waiting for a wandering knight to return. And she no longer can carry this sword, terrible and wonderful and heavy enough to slip beneath the water. That was the old way, with the swords of bronze, and her mother still remembers.

It's heavier still when she lifts it. As if it doesn't want to go. But she throws it as hard as she can, and before it can strike the water, there comes an arm and an hand above the water to meet it, and catch it, and so shake it thrice and brandish it, and then to vanish away both hand and sword in the water, and there's our Constance left behind with nothing for it but to row against the current, to row home and tend to her cats, to guard what she can against the dying days of Uther and know the spring's on its way again.