‘Dian?’ I whispered into the stone’s heart, ‘my dear Dian? Wait for us, my darling, and we will come to you. Dian.’ My dead daughter, my lovely Dian, murdered by Lancelot’s men. I told her we loved her, I sent her Aelle’s kiss, then I leaned my forehead on the cold rock and thought of her little shadowbody all alone in the Otherworld. Merlin, it is true, had told us that children play happily beneath the apples of Annwn in that death world, but I still wept as I imagined her suddenly hearing my voice. Did she look up? Was she, like me, crying?
