I screamed the house awake. That is not a brave thing to admit, but I have promised this account the truth, and the truth is that I stood in a drowned chapel with a hollowed girl wearing a dead enchantress's voice and I screamed like the child I had been behind the tapestry, and the screaming was the only ward I had ready.
It was enough to wake the Greymother. She came down through the wet grass faster than any old woman should move, with Nimue behind her and a fistful of ward-stones already burning cold in her hand, and she put herself between me and the thing in the spring without breaking stride.
"Elen, child," she said, and her flat patient voice had gone soft, which was worse than any shout. "I see you under it. Come out of the water. The cold cannot hold a girl who keeps her own name. Say your name for me, Elen. Say it and walk to me."
"Elen drowned three nights ago," said the thing wearing Elen, kindly. "I have only been keeping her warm. You taught her the wells, Greymother. You opened all those doors in her little head and left them open. Did you never think who else might walk through?"
I watched the Greymother understand that she had carried the Hollow into her own house, in the skin of a girl she had taught to read her dreams, and I watched her decide, in one breath, what it would cost to put it out. She did not look back at me. She only said, "Nimue. Take the Reader to the boats. Now. Whatever you hear."
"Mother — "
"Now."
Nimue dragged me. I fought her, and she was stronger than grief and she got me up the slope, and behind us in the drowned chapel the Greymother did the thing that the last sister but one had done and lived, and that this time she did and did not. She named it. Not the whole name — she had not the well-water in her for the whole name, and she knew it — but enough. Enough to drive the Hollow out of poor drowned Elen and out of the Nine Wells and back behind its brick, screaming, for a while. The water of the cove froze solid in the warm of summer and then cracked all at once like a struck bell, and every candle on the island went out, and when Nimue and I came back down in the grey dawn the Greymother was sitting against the green altar with her eyes open and her hands folded and no breath in her, and a single straight line of frost lay across her lap where the cold had gone over her on its way out.
"She bought us a season," Nimue said. She was not crying. She had gone somewhere past crying, somewhere flat and old, and I understood then that the Wells make their teachers out of girls who have watched their teachers die. "A season, maybe two. Then it comes back, and it comes for you, because you're the one the song wants. Morgana." She gripped my arms. "There's a thing you have to know, and I should have told you the first night, and I didn't because I am a coward and I liked having a friend. Sebile sends me letters. Has for a year. By raven. She knew you were coming here before you did. She has been — steering. Me. The ferry. The whole of it. I did not bring you to the Wells to be saved, I brought you to the Wells because she told me where to put the boat. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought I could love you and obey her both and I cannot, no one can, two truths can't stand in one — "
"Stop." I held my friend's traitor face in my two hands the way my mother had held mine. I could not even be angry. I had been raised by a woman who married a wolf for love; I knew what it was to be steered. "Where is she? Sebile. In the flesh. Where does she wear her own face?"
"She doesn't have one anymore," Nimue whispered. "That's what wearing it does. She's a veil and a voice and a hundred borrowed skins. But the song says — the song says a daughter unmade can call the wearer out of all her skins into one, and end her, and the Hollow with her, with one true name. Or — "
"Or wear it," I said. "Yes. I have heard the song."
It was three days later that the raven came down out of the west with a different message, and this one was not for me but for the whole grieving island, and it was the kind of news that ends one age and opens a worse one. The queen at Tintagel had borne a son. Igraine had a boy, got on her by the thing in her husband's shape on a night I had watched through a slit in a tapestry — for the child was eleven years coming, the old craft counts time strangely, and I will not pretend to you I understand it; only that the boy was real, and the boy was the dragon's get the prophecy meant, and Merlin had ridden into Tintagel the night he was born and ridden out before dawn with the child under his cloak, and no one — not the king, not the weeping queen, not the realm — knew where the prince of Britain had been taken.
I knew. Of course I knew. I am a Reader; I had only to find still water and ask. But I sat on the cold shore of the Nine Wells with my mother's amethyst wand warm in my hand and I did not ask, because I had finally understood the shape of the whole thing, the way you understand a face in a fire just before the log shifts.
Merlin had not stolen my brother. Merlin had hidden him — from Sebile, from the Hollow, from the wrong-shadowed king the child's own mother had married. The boy was the realm's hope and the realm's bait at once, and the only blade in all the world that could cut the Hollow out of a crowned man before it could pour itself into a new young king was a sword that had lain in a stone since before the songs, dressed up as a test of kings to keep honest hands off it.
Caelvane. The shadow-cutter. And the song said a daughter unmade could draw it where no king could.
I stood up off the cold shore. The amethyst in the wand had gone from warm to hot, and through it, faint, I heard the thing my mother had hidden from the cold — heard it say, in her true voice this time, the voice under the voice: Go and get the sword, my heart. And when she offers you the crown of it, when she shows you everything you could keep and everyone you could stop losing — remember that I chose the cold over the crown once, for you, and it was worth it. Go.
I went to get the sword. I did not tell Nimue. I left her on the island with her dead teacher and her traitor's grief, which I think now was its own small cruelty, and I have a great deal to answer for, and this is the account in which I answer for it.
I only learned later what came up the western water behind me, three days after I'd gone — that the veil and the voice and the hundred skins came to the Nine Wells in the dusk, and asked, very kindly, for the friend I had left behind.