The stone stood in a high cold valley where the Church had three times tried to raise a chapel and three times found its walls fallen by morning. A single weathered menhir, split down the centre as if by an old grief, and in the split, to the hilt, a sword. Caelvane. It had no jewels. It was not beautiful. It was the colour of river water under cloud, and it drank the light the way the tenth well drank sound, and when I came up the valley toward it through the snow that should not have been there in summer, every shadow in that place leaned toward me, and the sword's shadow did not exist at all.
Accolon was waiting at the stone.
He should not have been. He had a kingdom between him and that valley, and an oath, and a wrong-shadowed master. He stood up off the cold ground when he saw me and I saw what the season had cost him — he had ridden himself to bone to be there before me — and he said, before anything else, the way an honest man gets the worst thing said first: "Your mother is alive. Hold to that. But Tintagel has fallen to the Pale, and the king — the thing in the king — knows the child is hidden, and knows you've come for the sword, and it is coming here behind me with everything it wears. I rode to tell you. And to stand where you stand, if you'll have a damned man at your back."
"Why," I said. "You swore to it."
"I swore to a crown," he said. "Not to the cold inside it. There's a difference, and a man finds it out too late or not at all, and I'd rather be too late than not at all." He almost smiled. "Also I have been in love with you since you came down a stair eleven years too proud at a wedding I was ashamed to attend, and a man will untell a great many oaths for that. Draw the sword, Morgana. I can hear them in the pass."
I set my hand to Caelvane's hilt. It was like gripping the line of frost the cold leaves behind it. The song was true: it came up out of the stone for me as though the stone had only ever been holding it for my hand, no king's strength needed, only a name unmade and unmothered — and the weight of it ran up my arm and woke the dead place where my feeling had gone out at nine years old, and for the first time in my life that arm was whole and burning and mine.
Then the snow at the head of the valley stood up and became people.
That is the only honest way I can tell it. The Pale do not march. They were simply there, where the snow had been — a hundred faces I half knew, stewards and knights and washerwomen and one small marsh-country novice called Elen, all of them with their shadows falling the wrong way, all of them smiling, and walking down toward us with the patience of weather. And at their head, at last, in the centre of all her borrowed skins, the veil.
She stopped a sword's length off. She let me look. And then she did the cruellest thing she had yet done: she lifted the veil.
The face under it was mine.
Older. Colder. Worn thin as the silver on an old mirror. But mine — my mother's mouth that I had got from her, my father's I had been told I had, the sharp pale Reader's face I washed every morning in a basin. "You see," said Sebile, with my own face and a voice like the bottom of a well, "why I have waited for you, and no one else, for two hundred years. We are the same girl, you and I. Reader, motherless soon, friendless now — yes, your Nimue, I am wearing a little of her too, she sends her love and her apology and the rest of her — and standing in the snow with the one sword that can end it, and one impossible choice. I made that choice. I will save you the despair of making it badly."
"You wore it," I said. "The song's other ending. You took the Hollow into your own mouth and instead of unmaking it you — kept it."
"I ended the dying," she said, and for one breath her stolen face was naked and young and grief-struck and I saw the girl she had been. "Do you know what it is to name a thing and feel it pour into you and have the strength, in that instant, to either snuff it or hold it? To hold it is to never lose anyone again. To hold it is to be the cold that takes, instead of the warm thing taken. I have not buried a single person I loved in two hundred years, Morgana, because I stopped letting them be people. That is the bargain. I am offering it to you with both hands. Take the sword's name into your mouth and keep it, and stand beside me, and we will end the hollowing of the world forever by being the only two who hollow — and you will never, ever stand at another grave where the dew does not freeze."
And God help me — God, or the old gods, or the stones of Tintagel that once leaned into my hand — I wanted it. I had buried my nurse and lost my friend and left my mother to a wolf and forgotten the sound of my own father's voice, and a worn cold woman with my own face was offering me an end to all losing, and I wanted it the way you want to lie down in snow.
Behind me Accolon said, very quietly, "Morgana. Your mother chose the cold over the crown. You told me that. On the cliff road. You told me what she said."
Sebile's borrowed eyes moved to him. Just moved. That was all it took.
Elen-that-was came out of the line of the Pale faster than weather has any right to, and Accolon stepped in front of me — between me and the killing cold, the way he had said he would, the way honest men do the one useful thing too late or not at all — and he took into his own living body the blow that had been meant to empty me.
The dew did not freeze where he fell. He was too warm. He stayed warm a long time, my hand on the wound and Caelvane forgotten in the snow, and he used the warmth he had left to say my name — my true one, the one everyone wanted and only he had never once asked for — and then he spent the last of it telling me to pick the sword back up.