“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 knowwhyI 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 toher. 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. “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.
