“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 wasone more word in a sentence that ended withshe 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.
