The south had grown golden in my long absence, and I hated it a little for how beautiful the lie had made it.
I rode down out of the cold North with my sister three days in her barrow and the wand against my heart gone quiet as held grief, and I crossed into my brother's country, and it was like crossing from winter into a painted summer. The harvest stood high. The roads were mended. Children I passed in the lanes had the round unhaunted faces of children who have never once been told to watch the ground where the shadows fall, and at every crossroads there was a new stone cross and a new song, and in half the songs there was a witch.
The witch was me. I will not pretend it did not sting to hear myself sung wicked by a milkmaid who would have been a frozen corpse in a reed-bed if not for the very wickedness she sang. Morgan the Fay, Morgan the false, the king's dark sister who covets his crown. They had even got my hair right. Merlin's lie had needed a villain to carry off the memory of the cold — a people cannot forget a terror without hanging it on a hook, and I was the hook. He had told me once, gently, that I would be the worst served of all. He had not told me he was the one who would serve me up.
I found Accolon where Nimue's last letter said he would be: keeping a ruined chapel on a moor above the western sea, an old knight gone grey at the temple, broad still, slower now, tending a thing the songs called the Stone of the Sword and the king's heralds called treason to approach.
He knew me before I dismounted. Twenty years and a villain's reputation between us, and he knew me, and he came across the cropped turf with his bad knee and took my hand in both of his the way he had once, briefly, on a postern stair.
"You're alive," he said. "The songs can't decide. Half have you drowned, half have you reigning in some hell of your own. None of them have you tired and grey and getting down off a northern garron like a woman who's been riding too long." He looked at my face properly. "Morgause?"
"The cold." My voice did not break. I had used it all up in the North. "It came back, Accolon. A seed of it. I have spent twenty years carrying that seed against my heart and calling it my mother's love, and it has woken, and it has a face now, and the face is mine, and it is sitting on a holy island in my sister's country killing herd-boys and calling it prayer."
He took that the way he took everything, slowly, all the way in. "And you've come for the sword."
"I've come for the sword."
He turned and looked at the ruined chapel, where in the broken nave a weathered standing stone held a blade so old its making was forgotten, hilt-deep in the rock, and the moss grew up to it and stopped, the way moss stops at a thing it does not like. "They've tried to draw Caelvane for twenty years," he said. "Arthur first, with the whole court watching, the day Merlin set it here and called it a test of the true king. It would not come for him. Merlin said the time was not ripe, and made a prophecy of it, and the harpers made a song, and everyone went home content." He looked back at me, and his old eyes were not content at all; they had never once been fooled, and the not-being-fooled had cost him a quiet life. "It was never a test of kingship, was it. You knew that. You knew it the day you rode out the postern, twenty years ago, with a dead nurse behind you."
"It's a test of who can pay for it," I said. "Caelvane cuts the shadow off the man. It is the only steel that bites a thing that is wearing someone. Merlin set it in a stone and called it a crown-game because a weapon that can cut the cold is the most dangerous thing in the world to leave lying about where the cold can see what it's for. He hid it in plain sight inside a lie, the way he hid everything, the way he hid me." I walked into the broken nave. The wand at my heart stirred for the first time since the island — not the seed, not my father, but something older in the amethyst, some kinship of made things. "It will not come for a king, Accolon. It never could. It comes for the one the prophecy means. Daughter unmade and unmothered." I put my hand to the cold worn hilt, and the moss-stopped rock seemed to lean toward me the way the stones of Tintagel had leaned, a lifetime ago, when a frightened child begged them for a wall. "It comes for the one already paying."
"Morgana." Accolon's voice, low and urgent behind me. "If you draw the king's sword out of the king's stone, on the king's land, there is no song in the world that saves you. Every harp from here to the wall will have it that the witch came in the night and stole the blade of Britain to murder her brother with. You will not be the misremembered villain any more. You will be the proven one."
"I know," I said.
And I drew Caelvane out of the stone like a splinter out of a long-healed wound, clean, with a sound like the first crack of a thaw, and the whole moor went silent, and somewhere far to the east a king sat up in his golden hall not knowing why his heart had gone cold, and I held in my two hands the proof of every lie they would ever tell about me, and I had never in my life felt so much like the woman the songs said I was.