The Nine Wells do not let you find them. They let you stop looking, and then you are there.
I had been three days on the western water in a hide boat with a silent ferrywoman when the mist came down like a dropped curtain, and when it lifted I was sliding into a green cove ringed by nine springs, each one ringed in turn by a round house of mossed stone with a turf roof, and nothing in the whole place stood straight. Everything bent around water. Even the women bent — toward the springs, toward each other, toward me, nine and ninety of them in undyed wool, turning to watch the new blade come to the grindstone.
The one they called the Greymother met me at the landing. Hesper, her name had been once, before she gave it to the work; she was old the way standing stones are old, and her eyes had the particular flat patience of someone who has stopped being surprised by grief.
"Reader," she said, before I had spoken a word. "We have not had a true Reader in forty years. Show me your hand."
I showed her. She turned it over, traced the line where the feeling had gone out of it the night my father died, and nodded as though a long sum had come right.
"You paid early," she said. "Good. The ones who pay early live longer. Come. You have a great deal to unlearn and very little time, and the time is not little because I am unkind. It is little because the thing that killed your nurse is not patient, and you are the reason it is hurrying."
They taught me in the round houses, one well at a time. Reading first, which I had — but wild, a hedge-witch's gift, and they made it a scholar's. Then Warding, which I had not, and badly wanted, since I had failed to ward the one door that mattered. Healing, which I knew. Seeming, which cost me three childhood summers I have never gotten back; I can no longer remember my father's voice, and that was the price of learning to throw a face that was not mine. They would not teach me Calling. And the tenth craft, the one with no well of its own — the Unmaking, the speaking of true names — they would not so much as say aloud.
Nimue told me about it anyway, in the dark of the novice house, because Nimue could no more keep a secret than a sieve keeps water, and loved me for asking.
"There are ten wells," she whispered. We lay head to head on the cold floor, two girls who had found each other the way the lonely do, fast and total. "Nine you may drink from. The tenth is bricked over behind the drowned chapel and no novice may name it, and do you know why?"
"Because it's empty."
"Because it's full." Her eyes were bright in the dark. "Of the only craft that can kill the Unhoused. To unmake a thing you must speak its one true name, and to speak a thing's true name you must first take its whole weight into your own mouth — and a name that heavy does not come out clean. It takes a piece of the speaker with it. The Greymother says the last sister who tried to name the Hollow ended it for ninety years and was never the same woman again. The one before her — " Nimue stopped. She did not like the one before her. "The one before her did not end it. She wore it. She is the reason there is a tenth well bricked shut, and a veiled woman in the songs, and a word the Greymother will not let past her teeth."
I lay very still. "What was she called, the one who wore it?"
"Sebile." Nimue breathed it like a draught under a door. "Daughter unmade and unmothered, same as the old song wants. Only she got to the end of the song and made the wrong choice, and now there is no end of her. She is what we are afraid you'll become, Morgana. You especially. A Reader who's just lost someone she loved. That's exactly the shape of girl the song goes looking for."
I should have slept. Instead I rose in the black middle of the night and went down through the wet grass to the drowned chapel, where half the nave stands in the spring and the altar is green to the waist, and I found the bricked place behind it just as she'd said, and I put my Reader's hand flat to the cold brick the way I had once put it to the stones of Tintagel, and I listened.
Something listened back.
It used my mother's voice. The low, glad voice I had heard through a door at nine years old. You came, it said, from behind the brick, from inside the stone, from the bottom of the tenth well. I knew you would. I have kept your name warm for you all these years. Shall I give it back?
"You're not my mother," I said.
A pause, like a held breath. Then, in a wholly other voice — a woman's, amused, terribly patient, the cold of the shut room: No. I am the woman your mother told you not to answer. But you are standing at my door in the dark with your hand on my wall, little Reader, and that is very nearly an answer, isn't it?
Behind me, in the drowned nave, I heard water move that no wind had touched. I turned. A novice stood in the spring to her knees — Elen, a sweet dull girl from the marsh country who could barely Read her own dreams — and she was smiling at me in the dark, and the moonlight came down through the broken roof and threw her shadow long across the black water.
It fell the wrong way.
"There you are," said Elen, in Sebile's voice. "Both of us, awake at last. Now. Shall we begin?"