They buried Aelinor in the lee of the chapel where the wind was kindest, and the priest said words over her that she would have laughed at. I did not laugh. I stood with my hands folded and my grief folded with them, and I watched the dew on the new-turned earth, and the dew did not freeze. That was how I knew the thing that killed her had already moved on to colder work.
He found me there after the others had gone in. I did not hear him come. One moment the churchyard was empty and the next the thin man stood at the foot of my nurse's grave as though he had grown up out of it, grey-robed, hawk-eyed, his shadow lying quiet and ordinary at his feet — which frightened me more than a wrong one would have. A man who can choose how his shadow falls is worse than a man who cannot.
"You are angry," Merlin said. "Good. Anger keeps better than grief. Grief you spend all at once; anger you can live on for years."
"You let her die."
"I could not be in two places." He tilted his head. "Though I am often accused of it. No, child — I did not let her die. I could not stop it without showing my hand, and my hand, shown too soon, costs more lives than one old woman's." He said it gently, and that was the cruelty of him: he was never gentle to be kind, only to be precise.
"You know what walked up that stair in my father's shape," I said. "Eleven years ago, and again at your king's shoulder. You know what wore the steward Branoc and stopped my nurse's heart. Say it. Say the word you've all been swallowing."
"If I say it here, in the open, it will hear its own name spoken and turn to look." His eyes went, just once, to the cliff above the chapel, where the gorse grew, and I followed them and saw nothing — and then saw her. A woman in a dark veil, standing where no path went, still as the saints. The same stillness I had carried out of my childhood and never named. My breath stopped.
"You see her," Merlin murmured. "Of course you do. You have always seen her. That is the whole trouble with you." He stepped between me and the cliff, and when I looked again the gorse was empty. "Listen to me, and do not waste the listening. There is a place in the western water where the old craft is still taught — the Nine Wells. You will go there. Tonight."
"I will not be sent away like a — "
"You will be sent away like a blade is sent to the grindstone," he said, "because you are no use to me or to yourself the way you are now: a Reader who cannot ward her own door, weeping over a grave the cold has already left. At the Wells they will teach you what you are. And while you are gone, your mother will do the thing she has spent eleven years preparing to do, and you will not be here to ruin it by loving her too loudly."
I went to find her, of course. I found her in the stillroom that had been my refuge and her prison, and she was not weeping, and she was not composed either. She was packing. My things. Into a travelling chest, with her own hands, the way she had done nothing with her own hands since the night my father died twice.
"You knew," I said. "You've known since the start that he'd send me off."
"I asked him to." She did not stop folding. "Do you think I married the man whose war made me a widow because I am weak, Morgana? I married the wolf to keep my hand on his throat. I have smiled at that thing wearing a crown across my own table for a season and let it believe I am fooled, so that you might grow up under its roof and never be looked at twice. Every kindness I have not shown you was a kindness. Do you understand me?"
"No," I said. "Yes. No."
"Good. Stay confused. Confusion is harder to read than love." She closed the chest. Then, for the first time since I was nine years old, my mother took my face in both her hands the way Aelinor used to, and her composure cracked straight down the middle like ice over a deep well. "There is a wand under the third board. Take it. It was not your father's. It was mine, before I gave the using of it away to keep you safe. The stone remembers. Let it teach you whose you are."
"Mother — what's in the crystal?"
"Something I love," she said, "that I had to put somewhere the cold could not reach. Go. And Morgana — " She caught my sleeve, the way I had caught hers eleven years ago and been struck for it. She did not strike me. "When the veiled woman speaks to you, and she will, do not answer her in your own true name. Whatever she offers. Whatever she seems to know of me. Promise me that, if you promise me nothing else."
I promised. I was twenty, and I did not yet know I was promising away the end of the story.
Accolon brought the horses to the postern himself, after dark, his cloak over plain mail, his king's badge turned to the inside. I had spoken to him exactly three times by then and trusted him for no reason I could have defended.
"You believe me," I said, mounting. "About Aelinor. That it was no easy heart."
"I believe my king's shadow falls the wrong way," he said quietly, "and that I have sworn my life to it, and that a man can be loyal and damned at once. Yes. I believe you." He set his hand briefly over mine on the rein, warm, brief, gone. "Ride hard to the water. I'll keep the gate slow behind you."
I rode hard to the water. And at the top of the cliff road, where Tintagel falls away into the dark and the sea takes the bottom of the world, I looked back the way you are always told not to, and she was there. The veiled woman, on the headland, between me and the lights of my mother's house. Close enough this time that I could see she was not still after all — that under the veil she was breathing, slow and patient, the way the deep breathes.
And she lifted one hand, not to stop me, but to greet me. As you greet someone you have come a very long way to meet. As you greet someone you have been waiting for since before she was born.
She smiled under the veil. I felt it more than saw it. And in a voice that was the cold of the shut room and the warmth of my mother's stillroom both at once, she said one word across all that wind, and the word was my name — my true one, the one my mother had just made me swear never to give — spoken as though she had always owned it.