We came to the mere at the dead grey hour, the three of us, and the rime had spread in the weeks I had been gone until the whole great water lay locked and white and silent under a sky that could not decide on dawn. Sebile's island sat in the middle of it like a held breath. She knew we were coming. Of course she knew. She had been waiting an age for exactly this — for the seed to come home, for the song to bring her its last verse.
"Stay on the shore," I told Nimue. "If I fail, you take the shard south and you find another Reader and you do this again in forty years, and you tell her she is not the villain. Promise me." Nimue promised. She was better at promising than I had ever been; she meant to keep it, and did.
Accolon I could not send back. So I let him pole the boat, and we crossed the locked water through a channel the cold opened for us like a courtesy, and Sebile met us at the reed-fringe wearing my own young face, and she smiled to see the satchel and the sword and the wand all come to her at once.
"You fetched your answers," she said, with my mouth. "Good girl. Now. Give me the seed, and I will give you your father, and we will see whose answer is the truer one."
I knelt at the water's edge and unwrapped the wand. And I did the thing I had been too afraid to do for twenty years, the thing my whole long second life had been a flinching-away from: I put my Reader's whole self into the amethyst, down past the seed, down to the small warm coal at the very heart of it, and I spoke to my father — not in my mind, not in the dark, but out loud, on a cold shore, for the first and last time.
"Father. It's Morgana. It's your girl. I have to let you go now."
And he answered me. Not in my mother's wrapping-voice. In his own — a voice I had lost in a Seeming-well twenty years before and grieved and never expected to hear again, low and Cornish and unbearably kind. I know, my heart. I have known a long time. You kept me warm. No man was ever kept so warm so long by anyone. Let me go, now, and take the cold out of me when you do, and do not — his voice gentled, the way Aelinor's had, the way my mother's had, all my dead teaching me the same last lesson — do not bargain. I am already gone. I have been gone since you were nine. What you have loved is the warmth of my going, and warmth is not a man, and you cannot live in the doorway of my death forever, the way I have watched you live in the doorway of every death. Go and be cold a while, and then be warm with the living. That is all I ever wanted, on the stair, the night I came home dead. Now. Let me go.
I let him go.
I broke the binding my mother had made of her own voice and her own grief, and the warm coal at the heart of the amethyst guttered up bright for one breath — and for that one breath I had my father, whole and gone and forgiving, and then he was simply not there any more, the way the dead are not there, and the warmth went out of the stone forever, and the seed of the cold that had slept tangled around him came loose and rose up off the water in a thread of white and flew, glad and homing, into the breast of the woman wearing my face.
Sebile gasped. She doubled, and straightened, and when she straightened she was whole — the last warmth of her old true body returned to her, and with it, terribly, the one weakness she had bargained away an age ago: a single mortal shape, that could at last be ended.
"Oh," she breathed, with my young mouth, and there was wonder in it, and fear, the first fear I had seen in her. "Oh, you clever, cruel girl. You gave me back my death."
And the cold, freed and furious to find itself mortal again, struck — not at me, it could not reach me, it had no handle left on me, I had just let go of the last one on a cold shore. It struck at the only warm thing within its reach. It struck at Accolon.
I felt the rime go for him the way it had gone for Morgause, the white sliding off the reeds and up his old war-gear, and I had Caelvane in my hand and I was too slow, I was always going to be too slow, that is the whole grief of being the one who pays — and Accolon, who had stopped taking my orders the day he chose to be damned beside me, did the last disobedient thing of his disobedient loyal life. He stepped in front of it. He stepped between the cold and me, knowing, the way he had always known everything, slowly and all the way through, and he took the rime into his own chest meant for nothing, meant only for spite, and he turned to me as it took him with the old brief warmth still on his face.
"Slow door," he said. "Told you. I'd keep it slow." And he settled, the way they settle, against the reeds, with frost in his open eyes and no mark on him, and the songs would later say the witch's pawn died working her wickedness, and the truth is he died keeping a door, the way he had kept the sword's stone, the way he had kept faith, twenty years, with a woman the whole world told him was the dark.
I did not have time to grieve him. That is the cruelest arithmetic of all, and the cold knows it, and counts on it. I had a mortal thing wearing my face in front of me and a bound wizard in a shard in my hand and the one window in an age to end the cold forever, and Accolon settling cold at my feet, and I made the choice the prophecy had been driving me toward since I was nine years old behind a tapestry.
I opened the satchel. I took out the shard. And I let Merlin out to say his last sentence.