CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT #3
“Do you understand that, Morganna? When the time came, when Guinevere was newborn and I had to send her from this place before Merlin could find her, before Arthur’s men swept through the lands looking for anything with magic in its blood... I could not carry her. I could not walk her to safety.
I could not place her in the arms of the people I had chosen to raise her and look them in the eyes and say: here is my daughter, guard her well.”
Nimue’s jaw tightened. “I had to put her in a basket lined with reeds from the deepest part of this lake. I wove every protection I possessed into the weave of it. And then I set her on the water and I guided her downstream...”
Her hands fisted at her sides, and even though it had been over twenty years since the moment she gave Guin away, I could see that the pain still hurt her as freshly as if it had only just occurred.
“I felt her the entire way,” Nimue continued.
“Through every current, every bend in the river, every small sound she made, but when the people she grew to think of as her mother and father lifted her from the water onto the bank, the connection ended. Guinevere left the water, and she left my reach, and I could not follow.”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“That is why your words offer me no comfort,” she finished.
“I know.”
“Understanding is not amending.”
“I know that, too.”
“Then what do you want from me, Morganna?”
The honest answer surfaced before I could arrange it into something more elegant.
“I wanted to see you,” I said. “I have wanted to see you for a very long time. And I needed you to know... before whatever happens next, before the veil tears the rest of the way and everything changes... I needed you to know that I am sorry. That it was never strategy.
That I was a coward who loved you and did the worst possible thing a coward who loves someone can do.”
A long silence.
“It is not enough,” Nimue said.
“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”
We stood at the edge of the lake for some time after that, neither of us saying anything. She was the first to break the silence.
“The veil is failing fast.”
“That’s why I came.” I looked at her. “Not the only reason, of course, but it’s why I came now, rather than—”
“—Rather than never.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you’ve seen.” It wasn’t forgiveness, and it wasn’t warmth. It was two old enemies who had once been something far more complicated, choosing to face the same direction for a moment because the thing in front of them was larger than the wound between them.
I told her about the dreamwalks, about the thinning at Camelot’s walls, about the dead sparrow my raven had brought me, about the feeling that something was changing for the worse, about the dread that had claimed me and never let go.
Nimue listened, and her face moved very little, but her eyes kept doing that shifting thing: from sea-glass green to storm-dark blue, and around her feet the water rose and fell as if it were breathing.
“Then you believe it is Nymera?” Nimue asked, saying the name that I was sure brought a shudder through her just as much as it did me.
“Yes.”
Nimue stepped fully onto the bank, and the water released her without sound.
She was now close enough that I could see what I always tried not to look at directly: the specific quality of what the centuries had done to her.
She was ageless the way rivers were ageless.
Preserved, but the wrong kind of preserved: not untouched but held in suspension, arrested in a form that was no longer entirely living and no longer entirely not.
The binding to the sword had done this. The great working, the one we had built together in the deep years when we still believed the cost could be distributed evenly between us, before I’d made the biggest mistake I would ever make.
I’d designed the anchor points, the recursive seals, the language of compulsion that would hold the enchantment to the physical form of the blade and let the blade be touched by mortal hands without the magic unraveling on contact.
I’d done the hardest theoretical work, the part that took years to develop, and I’d been very proud of that.
Then Nimue had taken the heavier burden: the living portion. The part that required someone to be present in the binding, always, a continuous anchor, sustaining the enchantment through sheer connection with the water, the sword, and the thin space between worlds that the lake occupied.
“We are going to need each other for what comes next,” I said.
Nimue looked at me as, behind her, the lake trembled. “I know,” she said, followed by a pause that had real weight. “I have known since Guinevere arrived.”
The silence that followed was the particular silence of two people who had survived the same catastrophe from opposite sides of it, who had been altered by it in different directions and had each spent years trying to determine whether what remained between them was a relationship or the scar
tissue left where a relationship had once been.
We stood at the water’s edge with that between us, neither of us moving to resolve it.