We could not simply go north. Nothing in my life has ever been simply anything.
The boy — his name was Cadan, and he was sworn to my sister's hearth, which in the North means more than sworn to her crown — wanted to put me straight back in his hide boat and row for the mainland on the next tide. I let him want it for the space of one cup of cider while I told him why we would not.
"If I take this into your boat," I said, and set the wand on the table between us, where the amethyst sat ticking out its small new heat like a banked coal, "and the seed in it wakes the rest of the way on the open water, there is nothing on a hide boat to ward it and no land to run to. It would have you, and the ferrywoman, and then it would have me — and I am the one mouth in the world that knows how to end it, so it would be very glad indeed to have me. We do not carry a fire into a hold full of straw because we are in a hurry."
Cadan looked at the wand the way you look at an adder in the rushes. "Then leave it. Leave the cursed thing here and come north with empty hands."
"I can't." And here is where I have to tell you what's in the stone, because Cadan asked me plainly across a table and I have never been able to lie to a frightened young person; it is one of my few virtues and it has cost me more than all my vices. "There are two things bound in that crystal, boy, and they are wound around each other like two roots in one pot. One of them is the seed of the cold. The other one is my father."
He did not understand. Why would he. I had not understood it myself until the stone went hot and I finally, after twenty years, sat down and Read the thing I had been too much of a coward to Read — because some part of me had always known that to look closely at my mother's gift would be to lose the comfort of it.
"The night my father died," I said, "a thing wearing his shape walked past me and went to my mother's bed. You will have heard that part; the whole world has heard that part; they have made a filthy song of it. What the song does not know is that my mother was not fooled, not in the deep place where the old blood lives. She knew her husband was dead on a field at Dimilioc even as the warm weight of the lie came down beside her in the dark. And she did a thing that the Nine Wells would have called forbidden and unforgivable and far beyond a duchess's small craft: in the very moment of her grief, with the cold lying to her in her own marriage bed, she reached past the lie and caught the last spark of the true man as it went out — caught my father's going soul the way you catch a falling cup, without thinking, because you cannot bear to hear it break — and she bound it in the one cold-proof thing she had, the amethyst at the head of her mother's wand."
"She saved his soul," Cadan whispered.
"She saved a spark of it. A coal of him. Enough to murmur to a lonely girl in the dark for twenty years in a voice I mistook for my mother's because my mother bound him with her own voice for the wrapping." My eyes had gone hot and I let them; I have wept in front of kings and ferrymen and I no longer apologise for it. "But you cannot reach into the cold and take something out of it without the cold reaching back. When she caught my father's spark, she caught a seed of the thing that killed him too, snagged on him like a burr. Twenty years they have slept tangled in one stone — the man who made me, and the cold that unmade him — and I have carried them both against my heart and called the whole of it love."
Cadan was quiet a long time. Then he said the thing that made me trust him for the rest of his short life: "So if you let the cold out to kill it, you let your father out too. And if you keep them locked up safe, your father stays a coal in a stone forever, talking in the dark." He turned his cup in his hands. "That's not a riddle a sword fixes."
"No," I said. "It is not. It is the riddle the second half of my life is made of, and I have been hiding from it under apple trees for twenty years, and your queen's letter has just walked it up to my door." I stood. "Which is why we do not run for the boat. We go to the one place that might hold the answer to a binding the Nine Wells called impossible — and the Nine Wells are drowned and dead, Cadan, the cold I made you cross a sea to fetch me for, it ate that school the year I left it." I lifted the wand and wrapped it in linen that smelled of emberfern, slow, the way you wrap a sleeping child you do not want to wake. "There is one woman left alive who knew the old craft before the Wells, who taught the woman who taught my mother, and who has every reason in the world to want me dead."
"Who?"
"My sister thinks the cold woke in the North by chance," I said. "It did not. Nothing about a cold that finds a queen who remembers is chance. Someone in the North is calling it, the way a child calls a dog, and I think I know her name, and I have not said it aloud in forty years." I went to the door and looked at the mist, which had not closed behind Cadan's boat — which was still standing open, waiting, the way a held door waits. "Get some sleep, boy. We sail at the turn of the tide. And when we land, whatever you see me become up there in my sister's cold country — whatever the songs start to say about the witch and the king and the ruin of the golden years — you remember this cup of cider, and that I told you the truth across it when a lie would have served me better."
He remembered. That is the only reason you are reading the true account and not only the other one. A boy in a grey-green cloak remembered a cup of cider, and wrote down what really happened, and hid it where the victors did not think to burn.