The shard opened in my hand like a seed-case, and Merlin stood on the cold water one last time — not the dying old man of the hill, but the thin grey watchful self I had hated and needed my whole life, translucent now, already half-gone, smiling the way a man smiles who has at last arranged his own ending and finds it fits.
"Little Reader," he said. "Over your father's grave I should have said this, and I said something clever instead, as I always did. So. Here, where it counts. You were never the villain of this story. You were the one who paid. Let me pay the last of it for you. I have wanted to, I think, since the beginning. A man cannot steer a child toward the edge of a prophecy for forty years and not come to love the falling of her." He turned to Sebile, who stood mortal and afraid in my young stolen face, and his voice changed, and went down to the bottom of the world. "And you, sister-of-the-cold. You have worn a girl's face down a whole age because you spent your own and had nothing of your own left to wear. Let me give you something of your own at last. Let me give you a name to die in."
And Merlin spoke his true name into Sebile.
I will not write it here. It is the one word I carried out of that morning, and it is not mine to spend, and a true name on a page is a door left open. But I heard it — the whole long weight of him, four hundred years, every king and every lie and every kindness done cruelly and every cruelty done out of love, all of it poured in one word into the nameless cold — and I watched it unmake him as he gave it, watched the grey translucent self thin to nothing with a look on it I can only call relief, the relief of a man who has carried a thing past all bearing and is finally, finally allowed to set it down.
He was gone before the word finished. And the word went on without him, into Sebile, and gave her what she had not had since before my grandmother's grandmother — a single, whole, mortal, ending self.
She staggered under it. And then, slowly, with hands that were my hands, she reached up and drew the veil from her hair, and she took my young face off like a mask she had worn too long, and under it was her own — old, so old, older than the drowned Wells, a tired Cornish girl worn down an age to bone and grief, the first daughter the song ever made and the only one who chose to wear the cold instead of spend herself, and she looked at me out of her own face at last, and she was not my enemy. She was only what I would have been. She was the door I did not walk through.
"Thank you," Sebile said, in a voice that was finally, wholly her own. "I could not give myself a death. The wearing takes that first. I have wanted to stop for a hundred years and could not find the latch." Her eyes filled, with my Caelvane bare and ready in my hand between us. "Be quick, little sister. And — be warm. Be warm with the living. Do not do what I did. Do not stand in the doorway of the cold so long that you forget you were ever a girl with a name."
I was quick. It is the last mercy I have ever given anyone, and the hardest, and I gave it with my father's forgiveness still warm in the empty stone at my breast. Caelvane cut the cold out of her the way it was made to, clean, with a sound like the first crack of a thaw, and the rime slid off all the locked white miles of the mere at once and ran back into the water as water, and somewhere a held breath was let go across the whole turning world, and the cold that had eaten my life ended — not driven off, not bound for ninety years, but ended, root and seed and last wearer, in the grey hour on a northern shore, with no one to see it but a witch and a dead knight and a weeping girl on the far bank who would carry the only true telling of it south.
That is the end of the cold. It is not the end of the account, quite, because endings never land where the songs put them.
I buried Accolon on the island, thumb to his heart, the old way. I carried Caelvane south and laid it back in its broken stone for my brother's heralds to find and make a hundred wrong songs about. I never saw Arthur again. He sent me, once, by a boy in grey-green, a single dried apple-flower pressed in a fold of vellum, with no word, which from my brother was a whole psalm, and which I have still.
And I came back to Avalon, where the mist takes me in for a great enough reason and lets me alone the rest of the time, and I grew old under the apple trees with Nimue, who kept her promise and was better at it than I ever was, and I took out my mother's wand one last time and looked at the amethyst, which is empty now, only a pretty cold stone, and I understood the last thing, the thing I had carried twenty years and never once looked at straight:
The veiled woman I saw at nine years old, at the edge of the torchlight, the night my father died twice — that was Sebile. She had come to Tintagel that night because the cold was being born in an amethyst not ten feet from where I hid, a seed snagged on a caught father's soul, and she had come to watch the next daughter the song would make, and she had smiled at me under her veil the way you smile at someone you have come a very long way to meet. She had been at the start of me. I was at the end of her. The story closed like a hand, the way the mist closes, the way a door closes, and a door — I told you this on the very first page, and it is the truest thing I know — a door can lie.
They will tell you I was the villain. They have a Historia of it now, in the south, in the king's good Latin, and in it I am Morgan, the Fay, the dark sister, the king's bane, and there is no Aelinor in it and no Morgause and no Accolon keeping a slow door, and Merlin dies bewitched by a wicked Lake-girl, and the cold is not in it at all, not one frozen reed, because the whole point of the lie was that there should be no cold in it.
Let them have it. The lie kept a world warm; I have spent my life learning not to grudge it. The truth I have given to a boy in a grey-green cloak who remembered a cup of cider, and he has hidden it where the victors will not think to look, and you are reading it, which means it worked, which means somewhere the world wanted a second one after all.
I am a grown woman now, older than I have any right to be, and short one name, and warm at last among the living, under the apple trees, at the end of the long account of how a healer became a villain by paying for everyone, and would do it again, and is not sorry, and only wishes — on the cold nights, when the stone in the drawer forgets to be warm — that she had answered her father out loud one hour sooner, on the stair, when she was nine, and the door first lied.
Here ends the true account of Morgan, whom they call the Fay. Believe the half of it that is kind. That half, at least, is true.