CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT #2
And I’d watched what the fire did to him across the years, and I’d told myself it was the cost of the thing, the necessary shadow beneath the necessary light, and I had believed that because I needed to believe it.
Now I was going to bring him to this place, and my daughter, whom I had also shaped, also aimed, also sent into a situation that would break her open whether she survived it or not.
I thought about what Guinevere would be when this was done.
More specifically, I thought about what the dragon would do to someone already made of water and old magic.
I thought about whether she would understand, eventually.
Then I wondered whether understanding was something I had any right to ask of her.
I had asked it of Arthur, but I did not believe he’d fully understood. He had become something else instead.
I agreed, but I said nothing. I simply stood, and the agreement stood with me, which was how these things were done between people who had crossed these particular thresholds before.
Blodeuwyn did not move. She looked at the cord.
“She won’t be what she was,” she said. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“Nor what you intended her to be.”
I looked at her because that statement had caught me. I knew enough of the old witch to realize she said things that you did not expect, but later that you regretted. “What will she be?”
She pulled a final knot through, then she held the cord still between both hands, just studying it.
“Something that doesn’t need you anymore,” she said. “Something that doesn’t need anyone’s permission.”
She said the words without malice, the way you might comment on the weather.
I left.
The path out was different from the path in, but that was no surprise.
My feet managed it, same as before, even as the trees thinned.
The listening quality fell away, and the birdsong resumed at the precise invisible line between the haunted woods and Thornhallow Forest.
The ordinary cold of evening came back against my face, sharp and clean.
I walked until I reached the Standing Stones, until I reached home.
The visions were quiet now. Every one of them, all at once, the whole relentless frequency of the past weeks now gone completely still.
It was worse than the visions had been because the quiet had the quality of a decision that had been made.
I pulled my cloak closer and kept walking.
-MORGAN-
The lake knew I was there before I reached the treeline.
The air changed first: it was a particular cooling that had nothing to do with the season, a tightening in the atmosphere like a held breath.
The water had told her I was here, but that wasn’t a surprise because it always told her since it was a part of her.
Every stream I’d crossed since leaving the ridge road was one more word in a sentence that ended with she is coming, and I don’t trust her.
I walked to the bank anyway.
The trees thinned, and the lake opened before me, still and enormous, the color of old pewter in the flat afternoon light. The surface showed nothing but a perfect mirror.
I didn’t call out, didn’t lift my hands, didn’t speak the twelve syllables of approach that the old texts prescribed for petitioning the Lady of the Lake.
Nimue and I had known each other since before those texts were written, since before the world of the living had even been born.
Ritual was for people who needed the structure of formality to feel safe, but neither of us was safe.
I stood at the edge and waited.
The surface broke near the center even though no disturbance preceded it. One moment the lake was still, and the next she was there, rising through the water with that terrible, unhurried grace, the way something surfaces that was never truly submerged but only choosing to be seen.
She crossed toward me, and the water seemed to carry her like a slow lateral drift that deposited her at the bank without visible effort.
Her hair moved in air that itself didn’t move.
Her eyes found mine, stayed there, but she said nothing, and in the saying nothing, she communicated several centuries’ worth of complicated opinion.
Of course, I’d imagined this moment before.
Many times. In some versions, I was eloquent.
In others, I was cold and controlled, all practicality and forward momentum, here for information and nothing more.
In a few of the darker versions, from years when the grief had calcified into something harder, I’d imagined not coming at all, but simply letting the distance remain.
It was easier to pretend from a distance. Easier and cleaner.
But standing here now with the water still moving at her feet and her eyes on my face, all of those versions dissolved.
She looked like herself. That was the thing I hadn’t been prepared for. She still looked exactly like herself.
“Morganna.”
One word. My true name in her layered, underwater voice. Two voices and then three, soft and resonant, trickling and booming at once.
“Nimue.”
My voice came out smaller than I’d intended.
“You should not have come,” she said.
“I know.”
“I did not ask for you.”
“I know that too.”
Her pupils shifted. The ripple-shaped irises caught the flat light and threw it back in a strange way, something that was almost off-putting.
She’d always been inhuman in ways that I, with all my transformation, all my illusory skins, could never quite replicate.
I could look like anything, but I couldn’t look like that.
“Then why,” she said, “are you here?”
I looked at her for a moment before I answered.
“Because there is something wrong with the veil,” I said. Of course, she would have already felt it, perhaps even seen it.
She pressed her lips together, and the water around her ankles went briefly still.
“You know I cannot leave this lake,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You know why I cannot leave this lake.”
The words fell precisely because they were aimed. But I deserved it. I deserved it and more.
“Yes,” I said again.
The silence that followed was the kind that had lived between us for longer than most civilizations. It had its own texture by now: both dense and cold at the center, like the deep water she could never leave.
“I have thought,” I began, shaking my head because in all the conversations I’d reviewed in my head, I hadn’t conceived this one. “Over the years. About what I would say to you. If I ever—” I exhaled. “I had several versions. They were all much better than this.”
Nimue watched me. Her expression didn’t change.
“I was afraid,” I finished.
Fear. The most simple, humiliating, and human of emotions, which was the worst of it: that I, who had spent centuries distancing myself from human weakness, had acted from the most human weakness there was.
“The logic of the decision, at the time, it seemed—” I stopped because I wasn’t sure how to continue, but I did anyway.
“There was no logic. I told myself there was. I built a structure around it that looked like strategy, but it wasn’t. I was frightened, and I did what frightened people do. I made a choice that protected me and cost you everything, and I called it necessity.”
Nimue still said nothing.
“I know that naming it doesn’t change it. I know the shape of the betrayal doesn’t shrink because I can describe it accurately. I’m not asking you to—” I took a breath. “I’m not asking for anything.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m telling you the truth.” I looked at her. “For whatever that truth is worth after this long, which is very little.” I paused. “I know it’s very little.”
The water moved around her, that slow, inevitable drift. Her face remained composed.
“You let me be chained,” she said. “As you walked free. You have walked free for all the years that I have stood in this lake and watched the world move without me. You have had your wars, your schemes, and your alliances. And I have had only this lake.”
She paused and breathed deeply. “Even Merlin had to come to me because I could not go to him. Because I have never been able to go to anyone. Everything that has ever been given to me has had to come to the water’s edge and cross the threshold into my world, because I cannot cross into theirs.”
Her eyes found mine again. “I—” But I didn’t know what to say, which made me shut my mouth and just sit with the guilt.
“Merlin was willing to enter my world entirely, without conditions and without reservation, and I believed that meant something about the nature of what he was. I believed it was a form of understanding.”
She paused. “I was wrong. A man can enter your world completely and still not comprehend the cost of what he asks you to carry when he leaves it.”
She breathed deeply again. “The worst of it was and is that I could not go to her. I have watched my daughter suffer, and I could do nothing about it.”
Her voice cracked slightly, just a faint fracture in the layered resonance, a single voice dropping out for a moment.
The sound of it was worse than shouting.
“I could not go to her,” she said again, quieter this time.
She looked down at her hands then, and I watched something move across her face.
“I could not even give her away myself.”
She looked up at me then, and there was fire in her eyes.