I went out to the island alone, in a flat reed-boat, at the grey hour when the mere could not decide whether it was water or sky. Morgause wanted to come. Cadan wanted to come. I forbade them both, and for once in my life I was obeyed, because I told them the truth: that where I was going, anyone I loved was only a handle for the thing on the island to take hold of me by.
The holy house was a low stone cell with a turf roof and a little crooked cross of bog-oak above the door, and it was the most peaceful place I have ever wanted to burn. The rime lay thick on every reed around it in a perfect ring, as though the cold here was not creeping but kept — tended, like a garden. A woman in a grey veil knelt at the water's edge with her back to me, and she did not turn as my boat hissed up into the reeds, and she said, in a voice like the first cold breath off a deep well:
"You took your time, little Reader. I have had the kettle on for twenty years."
"You have a herd-boy's death on you," I said, "and a queen's country, and my nurse's, going quiet in your hands. Do not play hostess with me, Sebile. I have come a long way to be unkind to you."
She rose. She was tall and unbowed, and the grey wool hung off her the way it hangs off a standing stone, and still she did not turn. "Sebile," she repeated, tasting it. "No one has called me by it since before your grandmother's grandmother teethed on a silver ring. I had half forgotten I was ever a girl with a name. That is what the wearing does, in the end — it is so warm, and you are never again cold, never again afraid, never again standing at a closed door listening to someone you love be taken — and the price is only your name, only the small forgettable fact of having once been a person. A cheap price. I have never understood why your kind weeps over it."
"Because the name is the person."
"Is it?" Now she turned. And I am a Reader, the truest the Wells made in forty years, and I had braced myself to look on a horror — a hollow face, a borrowed face, my mother's stolen face. I had not braced myself for the one thing she showed me.
Under the grey veil, Sebile had my face.
Not my face as it is now, worn down to bone and patience. My face as it had been at twenty, on the cliff road above Tintagel, the night I rode out to learn what I was. Sharp and unspent and certain. She wore it the way you wear a thing you have kept folded in a chest for centuries, a little out of fashion, perfectly preserved.
"The song only ever makes one kind of girl," Sebile said, with my own young mouth. "Reader. Motherless before she's ready. Standing at the end of the prophecy with the great cold's true name burning a hole in her tongue and a choice in front of her: end it, and spend herself, and lose everyone anyway, and be written down a villain by the men who lived because of her — or wear it, and never lose anyone again, and never be afraid again, and live. I made the second choice. I have worn your face down the whole long age between us, because it is the face the song hands the cold every time, and I have been so very lonely wearing it alone." She tilted her head. My head. "I did not draw the cold back to the North for cruelty, sister. I drew it back to draw you. I have spent twenty years calling the one coal you carry against your heart, because that coal is the last of my old body's warmth, and I want it home — and because you, you are the only other person in the turning world who knows exactly how heavy this is to carry, and I am so tired of carrying it where no one understands."
"You killed a herd-boy."
"I have killed thousands. So have you — you killed every soul the great cold would have warmed itself into for the next ninety years, you simply call yours saving." She stepped closer, over the rimed reeds that did not crack under her. "I am not here to fight you, Morgana. I am here to offer you the only mercy the song forgot to write. Give me the seed in your wand. Let me be whole again. And in return — " her voice dropped, and went, for one terrible instant, gentle, truly gentle, the gentleness I had not heard since a stillroom and a dying nurse " — in return I will give you back your father. Whole. Not a coal murmuring in a stone. The man. I know the binding your mother used; I taught the woman who taught the woman who taught her. I can lift Gorlois out of that amethyst and stand him breathing on this shore before the tide turns, and you can have, for the first time in your life, the thing the cold took from you on the stair when you were nine years old."
And the wand against my heart, which had wept all the long ride north in my father's voice — the wand went still. Listening. Hoping. I felt the small warm coal of the only father I had ever had lean toward the woman wearing my face, toward the promise of his own breath, his own hands, his own name; I felt my dead father want to live.
"You see," Sebile said softly. "He wants it too. Ask him. You are a Reader. Ask him whether he would rather be a man on this shore, or a coal in a girl's pocket forever. Go on. I can wait. I have nothing but waiting."
I stood on a cold island with my whole heart in a stone in my hand, and my father in the stone wanting to live, and the seed of the world's grief wound around him wanting to be born, and a woman wearing my own young face offering me the one bribe I had no defence against — and I understood, far too late, why my mother had made me swear, on the cliff road, never to answer the veiled woman in my own true name.
Because I had just opened my mouth to answer her.