My brother came for me himself. I will give him that, against everything the songs get wrong about both of us: Arthur did not send men to take the witch who had stolen his sword. He came alone, at dusk, up the moor to the ruined chapel, a big fair man in plain riding leather with no guard and no crown, because whatever else Merlin made of him, he made him brave.
I had never seen him grown. I had left when he was a stolen infant in a wizard's arms; the last I had of my brother was a wail in the dark the night Merlin carried him off, and now here was a king with our mother's copper in his beard, and he stopped ten paces from me with Caelvane bare in my hands between us, and he looked at me the way you look at a story that has walked up off the page.
"They told me you'd be terrible," Arthur said. "The Fay. The shadow-sister. I have been afraid of you since I was a boy. Merlin spoke of you the way nurses speak of the dark under the bed." He looked at my grey hair, my road-worn face, the sword shaking very slightly in my tired old hands. "You're not terrible. You're sad. Why did no one ever tell me you'd be sad?"
"Because a sad woman is harder to hang than a terrible one," I said. "Hello, brother. The last time I saw you, you were three days old and screaming, and a man you trust took you out of a window so that you could grow up warm. I have spent my whole life being the reason you never had to be cold. I am sorry it has made me your villain. It was always going to make me someone's."
"That's my sword."
"It was never yours. It was never anyone's but the one who'd pay for it, and I'm paying for it, and I'll bring it back when I'm done if there's enough of me left to ride. There's a thing in the North, Arthur. A cold thing wearing my own face, killing your subjects in their sleep and calling it holiness, in a country your songs have taught to forget that cold can wear a face at all. Your golden years bought that forgetting. I bought your golden years. And the bill has come due in the North, where my sister is three days dead of it, and I am the only person left alive who knows how to pay it." I lowered the blade. "You can take your sword back and hang me for a thief, and the cold will come down out of the North and into your warm forgetful country and you will not even have a word for what is killing you. Or you can let a sad old woman ride away with your blade and never understand why, and be a little less golden, and live. Choose like a king. It's the one thing I've spent everything to let you be."
He was quiet a long time, my brother, in the failing light. Then he did a thing no song records, because the only witnesses were a witch and a grey knight and a chapel full of dark.
"Bring it back," Arthur said, "if there's enough of you left." And he turned and walked down the moor to his horse, and he did not look round, and that not-looking-round was the only goodbye my brother and I ever had, and it was enough, and it was nothing, and I have lived on it for years.
Nimue reached us at moonrise, her garron foundered, herself grey-faced and hollow, and she had a satchel she would not set down and a look I knew, the look of someone carrying a weight they cannot put off until they hand it to the one person who can share it.
"It's done," she said, before I could ask. "He's in here. He — he asked me to, Morgana, you have to believe that, the songs will say I trapped him but he asked — " and then my friend, who had not wept since the Wells drowned, wept, and I held her in the dark of the ruined nave while she got it out. "He's dying anyway. The wards are failing because he's failing, four hundred years of holding the cold off a world that forgot to thank him, and he's spent, and he worked out the only sum that ends this without spending you." She pulled back and pressed the satchel into my hands, and through the leather I felt a shard of clear stone, and inside it, faint and dry and amused even now, the old serpent's bound and waiting self. "Sebile has no name to be spoken, so she has to be given one, and the giver is unmade — gone, nameless, forever. It was going to be you. He couldn't stand that it was going to be you. So it's going to be him. His name, freely given, spent into her, to make her a person who can die." Nimue's hands closed over mine on the shard. "He said to tell you he chose his last sentence. He said to tell you you were never the villain. He said — " her voice cracked clean through " — he said to mind the wand. That when you loose the seed to make Sebile whole, you loose your father with it, and the dead don't stay, and you are to let him go quickly, Morgana, and not bargain, because bargaining with the dead is exactly the door the cold first walked through, twenty years and a lifetime ago, on a stair, in your father's shape."
I stood in the dark with a stolen sword in one hand and a bound wizard in the other and my dead father warming against my heart, and I understood that I had everything I needed at last to end the thing that had eaten my whole life, and that the cost of using it was that I would have to say goodbye to my father twice — once as he went, and once as I let the seed that had pretended to be him go with him.
"Saddle the horses," I said. "Both of you. We ride for the North at first light, and Accolon — " I turned to the old knight, who had buckled on his own war-gear without being asked, the way he did everything, loyal and damned at once. "Accolon, you will stay south. I have lost everyone the cold could reach me through. I will not hand it the last one."
"No," said Accolon, and went on tightening a girth strap. "You won't."
"That was an order."
"I stopped taking your orders," he said mildly, "the day I worked out I'd rather be damned beside you than safe behind you. I've kept that sword's stone twenty years waiting for you to come back for it. You don't get to tell me to keep the door slow now." He looked up, and smiled, the old brief warmth, and I knew I would not win, and I knew, with the cold certainty that has never once failed me, exactly what it would cost me to lose.