The world wanted a second one after all. So here it is, and here am I, older than I have any right to be and short one name, sitting under the apple trees of an isle the songs put in the wrong sea, beginning again.
I will tell you first what is in the stone. I promised I would, and I have learned that a promise kept late is still kept.
But not yet. Some truths you have to walk up on slantwise, the way you walk up on a deer, or they bolt. Let me tell you instead about the morning the mist opened.
Avalon does not let boats land. I have said this before and it is the most important rule of the place: the mist closes like a fist around anyone who comes for a small reason, and only parts for a great one. In all the quiet years I had lived there, picking apples and teaching the few sisters left and listening to the warm thing in my mother's wand murmur in the dark, the mist had parted exactly never. So when I came down to the water that morning with my apron full of windfalls and saw the grey curtain drawn back like a bed-hanging, and a hide boat sliding up the shingle with a living man in it, I dropped every apple I held.
"Don't," said Nimue, behind me. She had come down the path without a sound, the way she did everything now; the years had made her quiet where they had made me strange. "Don't go to him yet. Look at his shadow first. You taught me that."
I looked at his shadow first. The morning sun was low off the water and his shadow fell long and proper up the beach behind him, every inch of it where it belonged. I let out a breath I had been holding for a count of ten.
"He's only a man," I said.
"He's a frightened man who crossed a sea no map shows," Nimue said, "to find a witch the whole world says is dead or wicked. Men like that are their own kind of dangerous. Be kind to him slowly."
He was young, mud to the knee, his cloak the grey-and-green of the North that I had not seen in twenty years, and when I came down the shingle he went to one knee in the wet stones the way you kneel to something you are not sure you should.
"Lady," he said. "I was told to ask for the lady with no name. I was told she would know it for a true asking and not strike me for it."
"Who told you that?"
"My queen." He lifted his face. He had the long northern bones, the pale watchful eyes; I knew the look before he said the name, and my heart turned over in me like a stone in a sling. "Queen Morgause of Lothian. She bid me say to you — " he closed his eyes to be sure of the words, a boy reciting a lesson with his life riding on it " — Sister. The cold has come back to my country. The dew freezes in the reeds and the old ones die in their sleep with no mark on them and their dogs will not go near the bodies. I remember what you never told me you did. I am too old and too watched to come myself. Come north, or the North dies quiet, the way your nurse died."
The windfalls rolled away down the shingle into the water, one by one, little dull splashes, and neither of us moved to stop them.
"That's not possible," Nimue said, very low, and she was not speaking to the boy. "You ended it. I was there. I held you when you came back without your name. It is ended."
"I ended the whole of it," I said. My mouth had gone dry as the old craft. "The great cold. The grief that decided to stop being a person. I took its true name into my mouth and I spent my own to unmake it, and I felt it go, Nimue, I felt the world get warmer by exactly the weight of me." I was already turning, already walking up the beach toward the apple trees and the cottage and the third board under which I kept the only thing I had carried out of the snow. "I ended the great cold. But a fire can be put out and still leave one coal."
I went into the dark of the cottage and I lifted the board and I took out my mother's wand, the slim dark wood with the bruise of amethyst at its head, and the stone was not warm.
For the first time in twenty years, the stone was not warm.
It was hot — hot the way a stone is hot that has lain too near a fire, hot the way a forehead is hot when the fever has turned — and through it, under the steady murmur of my mother's hidden voice that had kept me company through every long Avalon night, I heard a second sound. A small sound. A new sound. The sound of something curled up tight in the dark for twenty years, beginning, very slowly, to uncurl.
"Morgana." The boy had followed me to the door, forgetting his fear, because something in the room had changed the temperature of the air and even a boy could feel it. "Lady. What is that?"
I held my father in one hand and the thing tangled around him in the other — they were the same hand, the same stone, that was the whole horror of it — and I understood, the way you understand a face in a fire just before the log shifts, that the coal in the North and the coal in my palm were the same coal, and that I had carried the second cold out of the snow myself, warm against my heart, and called it my mother's love for twenty years.
"It's the rest of the story," I told him. "Get up off your knees. We're going north."