I picked the sword back up.
I want to tell you that I did it for the world, for the hidden child, for the realm the songs would build out of my brother. That would be a better ending and a worse truth. I picked it up because Accolon had asked me to with the last warmth in him, and because a worn woman with my own face had just shown me exactly what I would become if I lay down in the snow, and I would rather have died his way than lived hers.
"You see," Sebile said, almost tender, watching me rise with the shadowless sword. "Now you have lost him too. Now you understand. Put down the cold steel, daughter, and take up the colder craft, and you will never feel this again."
"No," I said. "I don't think I will put it down."
And I did the thing the Greymother had died half-doing, and the sister before her had done and never been the same, and Sebile had done and gone wrong: I opened my mouth and I took the whole weight of the Hollow's true name into it.
I cannot write the name. Even now, even here, in this account I have promised the truth — there are letters I will not set down, because a name that heavy does not stay on a page; it looks up. But I can tell you what it was made of. It was made of the shut room and the borrowed cloak. It was made of every door that ever lied and every shadow that ever fell the wrong way. It was made, at the very root of it, of one old griefstruck refusal — the first cold thing's first cold no to the simple unbearable fact that everything warm is also, always, leaving. The Hollow was never a monster. It was a broken heart that had decided to stop being a person rather than lose one more. It was Sebile. It was, I understood with the name on my tongue and the snow in my throat, very nearly me.
So I named it. And it poured into me exactly as she'd promised, freezing as it came, and in the one instant the song speaks of I held the whole of it in my mouth and felt the two ends of the prophecy open under me like two wells — end it, or wear it — and I had the strength, for that one breath, to do either.
Sebile reached for me. With my own hand. "Keep it," she begged, and it was a begging, two hundred years old. "Please. I have been so alone in here. Keep it and stay."
I thought of my mother folding my clothes with her own hands. I chose the cold over the crown, for you, and it was worth it.
I unmade it.
I will not pretend I know the mechanics of unmaking, only the cost of it, which I paid in full and am paying still. To speak a name into ending you must spend something of equal weight, and there was only one thing about me as heavy as the Hollow's name, and it was my own. So I gave it. I gave my name to the unmaking the way you give a coin to a ferrywoman, and the name went out of the world — out of every mouth, every song, every chronicle the victors were already writing in their warm halls. The Hollow ended. Sebile ended with it, and at the very last her face under mine was only a tired girl's, and she was grateful, and the snow let go of the valley all at once and it was summer, simple green summer, and a hundred stewards and knights and washerwomen lay down in the grass with their own right shadows and slept, alive, and never remembered.
And I had no name.
You have been calling me one this whole account, I know. Morgana. It is near enough. It is what the warm halls settled on afterward, when they needed a shape to hang the blame on — for the chronicles do not say a nameless daughter unmade the cold and saved the dragon's get. The chronicles, the kingly Historia they sing at court, say that Uther's witch-stepdaughter was a sorceress of ill repute who envied the boy his crown. That is the official truth. It will outlive me by a thousand years. I have read the first draft of it; Merlin showed it to me, the one time I saw him after, with something in his hawk's eyes that on a kinder man I would have called sorrow. "They will make you the villain," he said. "I cannot stop it. The world that lives because of you will need a witch to explain the cold it no longer remembers, and you have so conveniently misplaced your name." He was not wrong. He was never wrong. It is the most unforgivable thing about him.
My brother became a king. You know his name; everyone knows his name; that was rather the point. He never knew mine. I held him exactly once, a fair heavy boy with my mother's mouth, before Merlin took him off to be raised on the better story, and I let him go, because a child raised on the truth I carried would have frozen in it. My mother I saw once more, old and free of her wolf at last, in a stillroom that smelled of emberfern, and she knew me though I had no name to give the knowing, and she held my face in both her hands and we did not speak of any of it, and that was the warmest hour of my life and I have spent the rest of it living on the heat of it, the way you can live a long while on one remembered fire.
I live now where the mist allows, on an isle the songs misremember, among apple trees and the few sisters left who kept their teacher's craft. Nimue is here; what Sebile wore of her came back when the cold ended, most of her, enough of her, and we have forgiven each other the way you forgive the steered. I keep my mother's wand. The warmth in the amethyst is steady now, and on quiet nights the thing she hid in the cold so long ago speaks to me in her under-voice, and it is good company, and I will tell you what it is another time, in another account, if the world ever wants a second one.
This is the first. I have set it down because the victors set down theirs, and a lie left alone too long becomes a history, and a history left alone too long becomes the only truth there is. So: here is the other truth. A door can lie. A shadow can fall the wrong way. A girl with no name and a borrowed face's worth of grief can stand in the snow with the one cold sword and choose, in the single breath she is given, to be the warm thing taken rather than the cold thing that takes — and that choice, and not the crown, and not the blame, is the whole of what I was.
You may call me what the songs call me. It is near enough, and I have nothing truer left to give you.
But you, at least, who have read this to its end — you know now which of the two of us in the snow kept her own true name, and which one spent it. And you know the cold no longer comes in the night and stops the kindest hearts, and you do not know why, and you have a witch to thank for it, and her shadow, even now, even here among the apple trees, falls exactly the way it should.
— Here ends the true account. Let the other one keep the crown.