The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

From the moment they had laid that daughter in her arms, until the frail child’s last breath had ceased, Viviane had drawn her every breath in a kind of mingled delirium of love and pain, as if the beloved child were a part of her own body, whose every moment of contentment or suffering was her own. That had been a lifetime ago, and Viviane knew that the woman she had been born to be had been buried within the hazel grove in Avalon. The woman who walked tearlessly away from that tiny grave had been another person altogether, holding herself aloof from every human emotion. Kind, yes; content, even happy, at times; but not the same woman.

. . I had always felt that love was other than this, was that burning I had felt for Lancelet, for Accolon. For Kevin I had felt little save for that detached compassion, friendship, kindness; what I had given him had meant but little to me, and yet . . . and yet he alone had taken thought to come to me, to care whether or no I died here of grief.

It was a long season of mourning, and there were times when I wondered if I should mourn all my life and never again be free of it; but at last I could remember without weeping, and recall the days of love without unending sorrow welling up like tears from the very depths of my being. There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever; even in dreams, I never saw again his face, and though I longed for it, I came at last to see that it was just as well, lest I live all the rest of my life in dreams . . . but at last there came a day when I could look back and know that the time for mourning was ended;

“Sometimes I believe, Lancelet, that it does not matter what we do. The Gods move us as they will, whatever it is that we think that we are doing. We are no more than their pawns.” “If I believed that,” said Lancelet, “I should go mad once and for all.” Morgaine smiled sadly and said, “And if I did not believe it, I should perhaps go mad. I must believe that I had no power to do other than I have done.”