I had my name half out of my mouth — the true one, the one that is the door to the whole of me — when a reed-boat came hissing out of the grey behind mine, and my sister's voice cracked across the water like a whip.
"Morgana. Do not."
It was enough. A name is a long word when it is your own, and I had only spoken the first breath of mine, and Morgause's two words went into me and stopped the rest the way a hand stops a closing door. I shut my mouth on the syllable. The island tilted. I came back into myself standing knee-deep in cold reeds with the wand crushed white-knuckled in my fist and no memory of having waded in.
Morgause drove her little boat aground beside mine and was out of it before it stopped, old and stooped and queenly and utterly without fear, wading to me through the rime with her skirts black to the waist. "You told me anyone you loved was a handle for her to hold you by," she said, breathing hard, gripping my arm. "You great fool. Did you never once think that makes me the only safe one to come? I am old. I am spent. There is no long life in me for her to take and call a bargain. I am the one person on this mere she cannot use against you, because I have already decided I do not mind dying, and you cannot threaten a woman with the thing she's made her peace with."
"Morgause — "
"Listen to me, little sister." Forty years of letters, all their coded warnings, all their love written sideways so a censor could not read it, and here at the end she said it straight: "Do not give her the stone. Whatever she promises. Our father has been dead since you were nine. The dead do not get to come back; that is the one law even your kind cannot break without breaking something worse. If she can put Gorlois breathing on this shore, then what she puts there will wear his face the way the cold wore it on the stair, and you will have spent the world to buy back the very lie that started all of this." She shook me, hard, the way only an elder sister can. "Do you hear me? She is selling you the stair. She is selling you the night Father died, dressed up as mercy. Do not buy it."
And Sebile, behind us, said in my own young voice, very quietly, "What a clever old woman. What a shame."
She did not raise a hand. That is the part I could never make the songs understand, after — there was no blast, no black fire, none of the wizardry the harpers love. She only looked at my sister, the way you look at a candle you mean to put out, and the rime that lay on every reed of that island slid all at once off the reeds and onto Morgause, up her wet black skirts and over her gripping hands and into the open collar of her gown, and my sister's eyes went wide and then went still, and the cold took her between one breath and the next with no mark on her at all.
She did not fall. The dead Sebile makes do not fall; they were never quite alive enough, at the last, to drop. Morgause settled. Like frost settling. Like a held breath let go. She settled against me with her old hand still knotted in my sleeve, and her face had the perfect peace of the herd-boy in the reeds and my nurse on the stair, the peace of a thing that has been stopped rather than killed, and her eyes were full of white frost and surprise, and her dog was not there to keep watch over her, and I held my last living sister up out of the cold water and I did not weep, because some griefs are too big to come out through the eyes and have to come out, later, through the whole rest of your life instead.
"There," Sebile said gently, with my mouth. "Now there is no one left to stop your tongue but you. Speak your name, Morgana. Give me the seed. Let me make you the one mercy the song forgot. You have lost a nurse and a mother and now a sister to the cold — how many more handles must the world break off you before you let me take away the hand that does the breaking?"
I laid Morgause down on the floor of the reed-boat with her hands folded, the way you do, the old way, thumb to the heart, the way she had taught me before the priests came to teach us worse. And I picked up the pole. And I found, in the place where my grief was too big to weep, a thing that was very quiet and very cold and entirely my own, which is the only weapon that has never once failed me, and which is not magic at all.
"No," I told the woman wearing my face. "Here is the mercy the song forgot, Sebile, and it is not the one you wanted. The mercy is that I am not going to give you the seed, and I am not going to wear it beside you, and I am not going to spend the rest of myself unmaking you on this island today while my father screams in the stone. The mercy is that I am going to leave you here, whole and hungry and exactly as alone as you have been for an age, and I am going to go and fetch the one thing in the turning world that can end you without spending me — and then I am going to come back to this cold little garden of yours, and I am going to put out your candle, and the last face you will ever wear will be mine, and it will be afraid."
I poled out into the grey. She did not follow. She could not; the seed she wanted was leaving with me, and a hungry thing does not chase the meal out of reach of its own table. But across the widening water I heard her laugh, with my own young throat, and call after me the one thing that has kept me awake through every night of the long years since.
"Fetch your sword, then, little sister. Fetch your wizard and your weapon and your one clever answer. But ask Merlin, before you trust the asking — ask the old serpent what a true name is worth against a woman who spent her own true name an age ago, and has not got one left for you to speak."