Morgaine had feared this. She spoke sharply. "Elaine, you pledged your word."

"She is a Christian child--how can I send her from her mother into--into a world of pagan sorceries...?"

"I am, after all, her kinswoman," Morgaine said gently. "How long have you known me, Elaine? Have you ever known me do anything so dishonourable or so wicked that you would hesitate to entrust a child to me? I do not, after all, want her for the dragon, and the days are long, long past when even criminals were burnt on altars of sacrifice."

"What will befall her, then, in Avalon?" asked Elaine, so fearfully that Morgaine wondered if Elaine,[ ]after all, had harbored some such notions.

"She will be a priestess, trained in all the wisdom of Avalon," said Morgaine. "One day she will read the stars and know all the wisdom of the world and the heavens." She found herself smiling. "Her brother told me that she wished to learn to read and write and to play the harp--and in Avalon no one will forbid her this. Her life will be less harsh than if you had put her to school in some nunnery. We will surely ask less of her in the way of fasting arid penance before she is grown."

"But--but what shall I say to Lancelet?" wavered Elaine.

"What you will," said Morgaine. "It would be best to tell him the truth; that you sent her to fosterage in Avalon, that she might fill the place left empty there. But I care not whether you perjure yourself to him--you may tell him that she was drowned in the lake or taken by the ghost of old Pellinore's dragon, for all I care."

"And what of the priest? When Father Griffin hears that I have sent my daughter to become a sorceress in the heathen lands--"

"I care even less what you tell him," Morgaine said. "If you choose to tell him that you put your soul in pawn for my sorceries to win yourself a husband, and pledged your first daughter in return--no? I thought not."