The North did not used to be cold the way it was cold when we landed. I had ridden it once as a girl, in the years before everything, and I remembered it as a hard green country of black timber halls and antler gables and people who said little and meant all of it. The hardness was still there. The green was going.
We came up through Lothian in a grey drizzle that turned, the further north we rode, to a grey stillness — not frost, not snow, only a quiet that lay over the reed-meres like a held breath, and in that quiet the cattle stood with their heads down and would not low, and the dogs in the steadings pressed themselves to the thresholds and watched us pass with their hackles up and made no sound at all. Cadan rode tight-jawed and said nothing. He did not have to. I have spent my life learning to read a country's shadow the way I read a man's, and this country's shadow was beginning, field by field, to fall the wrong way.
"How long?" I asked him, the second evening, as we watered the horses at a mere where the reeds wore a white rime that the warm dusk should have melted and did not.
"Since midwinter. A steading here, a steading there. The old ones first." He crouched and put his hand near the rimed water and drew it back without touching. "They say in the halls it's a hard season. The young ones believe it, because the young ones don't remember a soft one. Only my queen calls it by its right name, and she only calls it that to me, because if a queen of the North says the word Unhoused out loud, her own lords will say she's gone witch-mad and put her son on the high seat in her place." He looked up at me. "That's the other cold up here, Lady. The one your kind never reckons on. It's not just that the thing has come back. It's that no one's left who's allowed to say so."
That, more than the rime on the reeds, was when I understood what Merlin had truly done — and I will give the old serpent this much, here in the account where I give him nothing else: he had not lied to make himself great. He had lied to make the world warm. He had taken the memory of the cold out of a whole people's heads so they could build their golden years without flinching at every shadow — and the price of that gift, the price he knew and took anyway, was that a people who have forgotten the cold cannot ward against it, cannot even name it, and will hand their own throats to it smiling and call it a hard winter. He had bought one bright generation by leaving the next one blind. It is the most Merlin thing he ever did. I have never been able to decide whether to hate him for it or to understand him too well, which with Merlin are usually the same feeling.
Morgause met us at a hunting lodge a half-day short of her own hall, alone but for two deaf old housecarls she trusted with her life — because a queen who rides out to meet a no-named witch in secret is a queen one whisper from ruin, and my sister had not stayed a queen for forty years in the North by being careless.
She was old. That should not have struck me as it did — I am older — but I had kept her in my mind as the sharp dark girl who used to send me coded letters, and the woman who came out of the lodge into the grey was white-haired and stooped and queenly as a standing stone, and when she saw me her hard old face did something it had not done in front of another living soul in decades, which was crack.
"You came," Morgause said. The same two words our mother had said through a door, the same two words a cold thing had said in a tenth well, and from my sister's mouth they were only what they were: relief, and grief, and forty years of being the only one in a cold country who remembered. "I was not sure the asking would even find you. The songs say you're dead. The songs say you're worse than dead. The songs say — "
"I have heard what the songs say." I took my sister's cold hands in mine. "Tell me what you have not put in any letter. Tell me whose hand is on the dog's leash, sister, because a cold this neat does not come north on its own, and you have known it from the first frozen reed, and you have been too afraid to write the name even to me."
Morgause looked at the deaf old men, who could not hear her, and lowered her voice anyway, because some names you whisper out of pure animal sense.
"There is a holy house on an island in the largest mere," she said. "An anchoress took it twelve years back — a veiled woman, very devout, the people love her, she heals the sick and blesses the cattle and asks for nothing. She came the year the prince was crowned in the south. She has never once shown her face." My sister's grip went tight as a snare. "Last month a herd-boy spied on her at her prayers, to see the holy face, the foolish brave little fool. They found him in the reeds three days after with no mark on him and frost in his open eyes and his dog sitting by him that would not be moved. And the anchoress wept very prettily at his funeral, Morgana, and laid her own veiled cheek against his mother's, and the mother has not been warm since."
The wand at my breast was no longer ticking. It had gone perfectly, deathly still — the stillness of a thing that has heard its own kind called, and is listening with its whole self.
"Sebile," I said.
"I made the cold up at the snow," I told my sister, and my own voice sounded very far away to me. "I held her tired girl's face in my hands and I felt her be grateful and I felt her end."
"Then either you are wrong about what you killed," Morgause said, "or the holy woman in my mere is something that learned her name and put it on. And I do not know which of those is worse, and neither, I think, do you."
I did not. I still do not, and I was there. But the stone against my heart had begun, very faintly, in a voice that was my father's and not my mother's for the first time in twenty years, to weep.